"Charles Mills's treatment of the biases in western philoso

phy in The Racial Contract is a tour de force."

-Award Statement, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study
of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America

"To take the arguments that Mills makes in The Racial

Contract seriously is to be prepared to rethink the concept
of race and the structure of our political systems.T his is a
very important book indeed, and should be a welcome
addition to the ongoing discussions surrounding social con
tract theory.... It would be an excellent critical comple CHARLES W. MILLS
ment to any course that covers the history of social con
tract theory or that deals with issues surrounding race and
racism."-Teaching Philosophy
The Racial Contract

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

This book is dedicated to the blacks, reds, browns, and yellows

who have resisted the Racial Contract

and the white renegades and race traitors

who have refused it.

Copyright 1997 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing
CONTENTS
from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press,
Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 1997 by Cornell University Press. ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1999
INTRODUCTION 1

Printed in the United States of America 1. OVERVIEW 9

The Racial Contract is political, moral and
Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers epistemological 9
and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. The Racial Contract is a historical actuality 19
Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract 3 I
that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. 2. DETAILS 41
For further information, visit our website at www.comellpress.cornell.edu. The Racial Contract norms (and races) space 41
The Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual 53
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social
contract 62
Mills, Charles W. (Charles Wade) The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and
The racial contract / Charles W. Mills. ideological conditioning 81
p. cm. 91
3. "NATURALIZED" MERITS
Includes index. The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/
ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-3454-9 (cloth : alk. paper) political consciousness of (most) white moral gents 91
ISBN-IO: 0-8014-3454-8 (cloth: alk. paper) The Racial Contract has always been recognized by
ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-8463-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) nonwhites as the real moral/political agreement to be
ISBN-IO: 0-8014-8463-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) challenged 109
The "Racial Contract" as a theory is explanatorily superior
1. Race relations. 2. Racism. 3. Social contract. 4. White to the raceless social contract 120
supremacy movements. 5. Political science-Philosophy. 1. Title. 135
NOTES
HTI523.M56 1997
3058-DC21 INDEX 163

Cloth printing IO 9 8 7 6 5 4
Paperback printing IO 9 8 7 6 5
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

he history that inspires this short book goes back a

T long way, and I have been thinking about that history,

and how to incorporate it into a philosophical frame
work, for a long time. Along the way I have incurred many
debts, some of which I have certainly forgotten, and this list
of acknowledgments is only partial.
First of all, of course, to my family: my parents, Gladstone
and Winnifred Mills, who brought me up to give equal respect
to people of all races; my brother, Raymond Mills, and my
cousin, Ward Mills, for consciousness-raising; my uncle and
aunt, Don and Sonia Mills, for their role in Jamaica's own
1970S struggle against the legacy of the global Racial Contract .

My wife, Elle Mills, has supported my work from the outset,

sometimes having greater faith in me than I had in myself.
Special friends, past and present, should also be cited: thanks
to Bobs, for old times' sake; to Lois, a friend indeed, and a
friend in deed; to Femi, fellow Third worlder, for numerous
conversations since our days in grad school together about
how philosophy in the academy could be made less academic.
Horace Levy, my first philosophy teacher, and for many years
the mobile one-person philosophy unit of the Mona campus of

ix
AC KNO WLEDGMENTS AC KNO WLEDGMENTS

the University of the Wst Indies, deserves particular mention, critiqued by members of the Politically Correct Discussion

as do Frank Cunningham and Danny Goldstick of the Univer Group of Chicago (PCDGC ); I have benefited from the criti

sity of Toronto, who welcomed me to the Philosophy Depart cisms of Sandra Bartky, Holly Graff, David Ingram, and Olu

ment graduate program there more years ago than any of us femi Taiwo. Jay Drydyk read the manuscript and gave valuable

cares to remember. John Slater's confidence in me and support input and encouragement . I have also benefited from audience

of my candidacy, despite my almost nonexistent undergradu feedback at the following presentations, from 1 9 94 to 1 9 96:

ate background in the subject, were crucial. To all of them, I the Institute for the Humanities, UIC; the Society for the

am obligated. Humanities, Cornell University; a colloquium at Queen's Uni

I originally started working on these issues on a 1989 junior versity; a panel at the annual meeting of the Society for Phe

faculty summer research fellowship at the University of Okla nomenology and Existential Philosophy; and a conference

homa. A first draft was written in my 1 9 93-1994 year as a titled "The Academy and Race" at Villanova University.

Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illi I have consistently received special encouragement in the

nois at Chicago (UIC ), and the final draft was completed during project from feminist theorists: my friend Sandra Bartky, Paola

my sabbatical in the spring term of 1 9 97. At both my previous Lortie, Sandra Harding, Susan Babbitt, Susan Campbell, and

and my present institution, I have been fortunate to have had Iris Marion Young. I have also learned a great deal over the

a series of Chairs who have been very supportive of applica years from feminist political theory and obviously owe a debt

tions for grants, fellowships, travel, leave, and sabbaticals: John to Carole Pateman in particular. My focus on race in this book

Biro and Kenneth Merrill at the University of Oklahoma; Rich should not be taken to imply that I do not recognize the reality

ard Kraut, Dorothy Grover, and Bill Hart at UIe. Let me say of gender as another system of domination.

how deeply grateful I am to them for that support. In addition, Alison Shonkwiler, my editor at Cornell "University Press,

I have made endless requests for assistance from Charlotte was highly enthusiastic about the manuscript from her very

Jackson and Valerie McQuay, the UIC Philosophy Depart first reading of it, and it is in large measure her conviction

ment's invaluable administrative assistants, and they have that persuaded me there was indeed a book here, and that I

been endlessly patient and helpful, greatly facilitating my should write it. For her energy and drive, and the keen editorial

work. eye that has undoubtedly made this a better book than it would

I thank Bernard Boxill, Dave Schweickart, and Robert Paul otherwise have been, I express my deep appreciation.

Wolff for their letters of endorsement for my application for Finally, as a stranger in a strange land, I have been welcomed

the UIC Humanities Institute Fellowship that enabled me to here by the American Philosophical Association Committee

begin the original manuscript. It was Bob Wolff's suggestion, on the Status of Blacks in Philosophy. I would like to single

seconded by Howard McGary Jr., that I go for " a short, punchy out and thank Howard McGary Jr., Leonard Harris, Lucius

book" that would be accessible to an audience of nonphiloso Outlaw Jr., Bill Lawson, Bernard Boxill, and Laurence Thomas,

phers. Hope this is punchy enough for you, guys. for making me feel at home. As a beneficiary of affirmative

An earlier and shorter version of this book was read and action, I would not be in the American academy today were

x xi
AC K NO WLED GMENTS

it not for the struggles of black Americans. This book is in

part a tribute to, and a recognition of, those struggles, and,
more generally, of the international black radical tradition of
political resistance that they exemplify.
c. W. M.

The Racial Contract

xii
 INTRODUCTION

When white people say "Justice," they mean "Just us." hite supremacy is the unnamed political system
-black American folk aphorism

W that has made the modern world what it is today.

You will not find this term in introductory, or
even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard under
graduate philosophy course will start off with plato and Aris
totle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and
Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and
then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you
to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism,
representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and
libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand
years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible
gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the
basic political system that has shaped the world for the past
several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental.
Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses
have for the most part been written and designed by whites,
who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they
do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironi
cally, the most important political system of recent global
history-the system of domination by which white people

1
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways,
continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a politi
cal system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background
against which other systems, which we are to see as politicat
are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision,
to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along.
Philosophy has remained remarkably untouched by the
debates over multiculturalism, canon reform, and ethnic di
versity racking the academy; both demographically and con
ceptually, it is one of the "whitest" of the humanities. Blacks,
for example, constitute only about 1 percent of philosophers
in North American universities-a hundred or so people out
of more than ten thousand-and there are even fewer Latino,
Asian American, and Native American philosophers.! Surely
this underrepresentation itself stands in need of an explana
tion, and in my opinion it can be traced in part to a conceptual
array and a standard repertoire of concerns whose abstractness
typically elides, rather than genuinely includes, the experience
of racial minorities. Since (white) women have the demo
graphic advantage of numbers, there are of course far more
female philosophers in the profession than nonwhite philoso
phers (though still not proportionate to women's percentage
of the population), and they have made far greater progress
in developing alternative conceptualizations. Those African
American philosophers who do work in moral and political
theory tend either to produce general work indistinguishable
from that of their white peers or to focus on local issues (af
firmative action, the black "underclass") or historical figures
(W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke) in a way that does not aggres
sively engage the broader debate.
What is needed is a global theoretical framework for situat
ing discussions of race and white racism, and thereby challeng
ing the assumptions of white political philosophy, which
2 3
INTRODUCTION
would correspond to feminist theorists' articulation of the
centrality of gender, patriarchy, and sexism to traditional
moral and political theory. What is needed, in other words, is
a recognition that racism (or, as I will argue, global white
supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power
structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege,
and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth
and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties. The
notion of the Racial Contract is, I suggest, one possible way
of making this connection with mainstream theory, since it
uses the vocabulary and apparatus already developed for con
tractarianism to map this unacknowledged system. Contract
talk is, after all, the political lingua franca of our times.
,
We all understand the idea of a "contract/ an agreement
between two or more people to do something. The "social
contract" just extends this idea. If we think of human beings
,
as starting off in a "state of nature/ it suggests that they then
decide to establish civil society and a government. W hat we
have, then, is a theory that founds government on the popular
consent of individuals taken as equals.2
But the peculiar contract to which I am referring, though
based on the social contract tradition that has been central to
Western political theory, is not a contract between everybody
("we the people"L but between just the people who count, the
people who really are people ("we the white people"). So it is
a Racial Contract.
The social contract, whether in its original or in its contem
porary version, constitutes a powerful set of lenses for looking
at society and the government. But in its obfuscation of the
ugly realities of group power and domination, it is, if unsupple
mented, a profoundly misleading account of the way the mod
ern world actually is and came to be. The "Racial Contract"
as a theory-I use quotation marks to indicate when I am
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
talking about the theory of the Racial Contract, as against the
Racial Contract itself-will explain that the Racial Contract
is real and that apparent racist violations of the terms of the
social contract in fact uphold the terms of the Racial Contract.
The "Racial Contract," then, is intended as a conceptual
bridge between two areas now largely segregated from each
other: on the one hand, the world of mainstream (i.e., white)
ethics and political philosophy, preoccupied with discussions
of justice and rights in the abstract, on the other hand, the
world of Native American, African American, and Third and
Fourth World3 political thought, historically focused on issues
of conquest, imperialism, colonialism, white settlement, land
rights, race and racism, slavery, jim crow, reparations, apart
heid, cultural authenticity, national identity, indigenismo, Af
rocentrism, etc. These issues hardly appear in mainstream
political philosophy,4 but they have been central to the political
struggles of the majority of the world's population. Their ab
sence from what is considered serious philosophy is a reflec
tion not of their lack of seriousness but of the color of the
vast majority of Western academic philosophers (and perhaps
their lack of seriousness).
The great virtue of traditional social contract theory was
that it provided seemingly straightforward answers both to
factual questions about the origins and workings of society
and government and to normative questions about the justifi
cation of socioeconomic structures and political institutions.
Moreover, the "contract" was very versatile, depending on
how different theorists viewed the state of nature, human
motivation, the rights and liberties people gave up or retained,
the particular details of the agreement, and the resulting char
acter of the government. In the modern Rawlsian version of
the contract, this flexibility continues to be illustrated, since
Rawls dispenses with the historical claims of classic con-
4 5
INTRODUCTION
tractarianism and focuses instead on the justification of the
basic structure of society.5 From its 1650-1800 heyday as a
grand quasi-anthropological account of the origins and devel
opment of society and the state, the contract has now become
just a normative tool, a conceptual device to elicit our intu
itions about justice.
But my usage is different. The "Racial Contract" I employ
is in a sense more in keeping with the spirit of the classic
contractarians-Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.6 I use it
not merely normatively, to generate judgments about social
justice and injustice, but descriptively, to explain the actual
genesis of the society and the state, the way society is struc
tured, the way the government functions, and people's moral
psychology.? The most famous case in which the contract is
used to explain a manifestly nonideal society, what would be
termed in current philosophical jargon a "naturalized" ac
count, is Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality ( 1755). Rousseau
argues that technological development in the state of nature
brings into existence a nascent society of growing divisions
in wealth between rich and poor, which are then consolidated
and made permanent by a deceitful "social contract."B
W hereas the ideal contract explains how a just society would
be formed, ruled by a moral government, and regulated by
a defensible moral code, this nonideal/naturalized contract
explains how.an unjust, exploitative society, ruled by an op
pressive government and regulated by an immoral code, comes
into existence. If the ideal contract'is to be endorsed and emu
lated, this nonideal/naturalized contract is to be demystified
and condemned. So the point of analyzing the nonideal con
tract is not to ratify it but to use it to explain and expose the
inequities of the actual nonideal polity and to help us to see
through the theories and moral justifications offered in defense
of them. It gives us a kind of X-ray vision into the real internal
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
logic of the sociopolitical system. Thus it does normative work
for us not through its own values, which are detestable, but
by enabling us to understand the polity's actual history and
how these values and concepts have functioned to rationalize
oppression, so as to reform them.
Carole Pateman's provocative feminist work of a decade ago,
The Sexual Contract, is a good example of this approach (and
the inspiration for my own book, though my use is somewhat
different), which demonstrates how much descriptive/ex
planatory life there still is in the contract.9 Pateman uses it
naturalistically, as a way of modeling the internal dynamic
of the nonideal male-dominated societies that actually exist
today. So this is, as indicated, a reversion to the original "an
thropological" approach in which the contract is intended to
be historically explanatory. But the twist is, of course, that
her purpose is now subversive: to excavate the hidden, unjust
male covenant upon which the ostensibly gender-neutral so
cial contract actually rests. By looking at Western society and
its prevailing political and moral ideologies as if they were
based on an unacknowledged "Sexual Contract," Pateman
offers a "conjectural history" that reveals and exposes the
normative logic that makes sense of the inconsistencies, cir
cumlocutions, and evasions of the classic contract theorists
and, correspondingly, the world of patriarchal domination
their work has helped to rationalize.
My aim here is to adopt a nonideal contract as a rhetorical
trope and theoretical method for understanding the inner logic
of racial domination and how it structures the polities of the
West and elsewhere. The ideal "social contract" has been a
central concept of Western political theory for understanding
and evaluating the social world. And concepts are crucial to
cognition: cognitive scientists point out that they help us to
categorize, learn, remember, infer, explain, problem-solve,
6 7
INTRODUCTION
generalize, analogize.lO Correspondingly, the lack of appro
priate concepts can hinder learning, interfere with memory,
block inferences, obstruct explanation, and perpetuate prob
lems. I am suggesting, then, that as a central concept the
notion of a Racial Contract might be more revealing of the real
character of the world we are living in, and the corresponding
historical deficiencies of its normative theories and practices,
than the raceless notions currently dominant in political the
ory.ll Both at the primary level of an alternative conceptualiza
tion of the facts and at the secondary (reflexive) level of a
critical analysis of te orthodox theories themselves, the "Ra
cial Contract" enables us to engage with mainstream Western
political theory to bring in race. Insofar as contractarianism
is thought of as a useful way to do political philosophy, to
theorize about how the polity was created and what values
should guide our prescriptions for making it more just, it is
obviously crucial to understand what the original and continu
ing "contract" actually was and is, so that we can correct for
it in constructing the ideal "contract." The "Racial Contract"
should therefore be enthusiastically welcomed by white con
tract theorists as well.
So this book can be thought of as resting on three simple
claims: the existential claim-white supremacy, both local
and global, exists and has existed for many years; the concep
tual claim-white supremacy should be thought of as itself
a political system; the methodological claim-as a political
system, white supremacy can illuminatingly be theorized as
based on a "contract" between whites, a Racial Contract..
Here, then, are ten theses on the Racial Contract, divided
into three chapters.
 OVERVIEW

I
w:ll sart with.m overview oJ the Racial Contract, high
lighting its differences from, as well as its similarities
to, the classlcal and contemporry sociill contract. The
Racial Contract i.s political, moral, and epistemological; the
Racial Contract is real; and economically, in determining who
gets what, the Racial Contract is an exploitation contraCt.

,
." .

The RacIal Contract is political, moral, and eplstemologlcal.

The "social comraet" is actually several contracts in one.

Contemporary contraCtarians usually distinguish, to begin
with, between the political contract and the 'moral contract,
before going on to make [subsidiary] distinctiens within both.
I contend, however, that the orthodox social contract also
tacitly presupposes an "epistemological" COntraCt, and that
for the Racial Contract it is crucial to make this expliclt"
The political contract: is an a.COOUnt of the origins of govern
ment and our litical obligations to it. The subsidiary distinc
tion sometimes made in the politiCAl contrAct 1s: between. the
contract to establish society jt:hcrcby taking "natural;" pteso-

9

\ cja] in dividuals OUt of the state oi nature and reconstfueting
and constituting them as members of a collective body! and the
contraCt tocstzhlish the state (thereby transferringontrightor
V dele t g relationship or trust the rightS and powers we
ga m lU t1
have In the s;:ate of nature to a sovereign govetrung entity).l
The mo ra: l contract, on the other hand, 1$ rhe foundatlOn of
the moral code estabUshed for the SOcletYI by whieh the citi"
zens arc supposed to regulate their behavior. The subsidiary
distinction here is between !;wo interpretations (to be cis.
cussedj of the relationship betwee n the mand contraet ane.
sr :ue of na.ture morality. In modern versions of the conuact,
mo st notably Rawls's of course, the political contract largely
vanishes, modern anthropology having long superseded the
nai ve social origin histories of the ClAssic contracta:ians . The
focus is then almost excl.nsively on the mor",1 contract, This
1
is not concei.ved of as an actual historie:al event that took place
on leaving the state of nature. Rather, the s late of nature
survives only in the attenuated form of whnt Rawls culls the
"original position," and the "contract" is apun:ly hypothetical
exercise (a thought experiment) in establishing what a just
,
i "b"sic structure" would be, with a schedule of rights, duties,
and liber ties that shapes citizens' moral psychology/ concep
I tions of the right, notions of self-respect, ete.l
Now the Racial Contraet-and the "Racial Contract" as a
theory, that is, the distanced, eri tical examinationoi the Racial
Coutraetfollows the classieal model in being both soeiopo
litical and moraL It explains how soeiety was ereated or cru
cially transfo[med, how rhe individuals in that sodety were
reconstituted, how the state was eseabll.<;hed, a.nd how a par
ticular mora l code and a cerrain moral psychology were
brought inro existenee, lAs 1 have emphasized, the flRacinl
COntract'" seeks to account for the way things are and how
tbcy came to be that Way-the descriptive-as well as the
10
C,/R,/IEW
way they should he-the normative-sinee indeed one of its
complaints about white politieal philosophy Is precisely its
orherworldiness, its ignoring of bask political realities,) But
the Racial Comract, as we will see,.1s' $<;,.epistemological,
prescrihing norms for cogniti.on to which its signatories must
adhere. A preliminary characterization would tun something
like this:
The Raeial ContraCt i s that set of formal or informal agree
ments Ot meta-agreements (highet-level contracts aboilt con
tracts) which set the limits of the contracts' validity) between
the members of one subset of humans, heneeonh designAted
by (shifting) "racial" [phenotypicalfgenealogieal/cultunill cri
teria el, C1., C3 ". as "whitc/ and coextensive (mAking
due aHowance for gender differentiationl with the class of
full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of hum:tlls
as "nonwhite" and of a different arul ,inferior mOfOli st,;ttus,
subpersons, so that they have a subordinateciV:il standing in
the white or white-ruled politics the whit either<alrcady
inhabit or establish or in transactions s aliens with these
polities, and the moral and juridical rules normitlly'r6guhiting
the behavior of whites in their dealings with one'another either
do not apply at all In dealings with non,whiteS .or apply li.lUI
in a qoalified form {depending in 'part'on chilngmg historical
cireumstanecs and what partieu lar variety of nonwhite is in
volved:, but in any ease the general purpose of the Contract
is always the differential privileging of tbe whites as II group
wirh respect to the nonwbites as a group, the expl oitation
of their hodies, land, and resources/ and the denial of equal
>
socioeconomie opportunities to theuL All whites are benefi
ciaries of the Contract, though some whites are oot signatories
to it.;
It wm be obvious, therefore, tbat the Racial Contra ct lS not
a contract to which the nonwhite subset of humans can be a
11
 ;H5 RACIAL Cm,rpJlCT
gcnuineiy consenting pany (thougll/ dcpcndillg again on the
circumstances, it rn-aysometjmes be politic to pretend that this
is the casel. Rather, it, is a COntract between those categorized as
;vhite ovet the nonwhit es, who are thus the objects-r;ltlier
than the subjects o f the agreement,
I
The logic of the classic social can trAct, pohtical, mora!, and
epistemoLogical, then undergoes a corresponding tefraetion,
with shifts, accordingly, in the key terms and prinCiples,
Politically, the commct to estaWish society <tnd the govern-
mcnt, thereby transforming abstr<lct rilcelcss "men" from
denjzens of the state 01 nature into sOc1<ll cre<ttures who are
politically oblig ated to il neutral state, becomes the founding of
a racial polity; whether white settler s t<ltcs !where preexisting
populations already are or can be made sparse: or what are
sometimes called "sojourner colonies," the establishment of
<l wh ite presence and colonial rule over existing societies
:which ate somewhat more po pul ous, or whose jnh<lbitants
are mote resistant to being made sparseJ.1n addition, the coto
nizing mother country is <ll so changed ny its relation to these
new polities, so that its own citizens are altered.
In the social contract, the crucial human metamorphosjs is
from "natuxal" nt<lO to" civil/political" man, from the resident
of the state of nature to the citizenoTthe cr;ated sOciety. Thi$
change can be mote or less extreme, depending on tlle theorist
involved. For Rousseau it is a dramatic transformation, by
which <lnhnallike cretltures of appetite and instinct become
citizens bound by jus tice and scl1-prescribed laws. For Hobhe.
i t is a somewhat more laid-b,lck afi<lir by which peop1e who
look out primarily for themselves learn to constrain their self
intetcst for their own good,l But in.aIl cases th e origmal "state
of no-lure" supposedly indicates the condition of all men, and
the social metamorphosis affects them nU in the S<lmc way.
In the Racial Contract, by contrast, the crucial metam or
l'
'
;;,:
"
. ,.' ;.
phosis is the preliminary conceptual partitioning and corres-
ponding transformation of huma.n populations into " wrote "
and "nonwhitel' men, The role played by the "state of nature"
then becomes tadicaUy different.ln the white settler state, its
role is not ptimarily to dematcate the (temporarily) prepoliti-
cal state of "all" men (wh o are really whitemenJ, but rather the
permanently pIepolitic.aI state or, perhaps better, nOl1Political
state (insofar as "pre-" suggests eventual internal movement
towdl of nonwhite men. The establishmen t of society thus
i mpl ies the denial that <l society already
,
ex:(std; the creation
of society requires the intervention of whit , me n, who are
thereby positioned as already sociopoliti9alei;ngs., White men
who are [deflnitionally) already part of sQciety encounter non
/
whites who are not, who are "s<lvage" resid ents of a state of
nature characterized in termsofwildern'ess',:ju'ngLe, waste l and .
These the white men bring partially jnto society as, sub orru-
nate citizens o r exclude o n reser V<lt ions or d y the xistence
of or exterminate. In the colonia! case, admittedly preeristiJ.:tg
but :for one re<lson or another) eficlent so cie:t-ies Idecaent,
s tagn ant, corrupt) a.re taken over and run lorthe " benefit" or
the nonwhite nath'es, who are deemed ehildlike, pable of
selfrule and handling their own3.fairs, arul tpus appj::pila.telY
wards of the state. Here the natives are u:a:UY.61iar'tr11id'
as "barbarians" rather than "savages," :'their ''State "f nature
,
being somewhat ruther away {though not, of cOYse" as remote
and lost in the past-if it ever existed hi tlIe' first place
as the Europeans' state of nature l. But in tim,s of crisis the
conceptual distanee between the two, barbarian and savage,
tends to shrink or collapse, for this techrricaldistinction w ithin
the nonwhite population is vastly less jmpoFtant tha.n the
central distinction between wlutes and nonwhites.
In both cases, tben, though il different ways, the Racial
Contract estahlishes a racial polity, a racial state, and a racial
13
 "lfE RAClhL COMRACT
juridical system, where the Status of whites and nouwhites
is clearly demareated , whether by law or cusw;n. And the
purpose of this state, by contrast with the neutral strite of
c1:Jsslc contt.:lctarianism, is, inter alia, specifIcally ro mamtain
and reproduce this racial o rder, seeuring the privileges an d .
advantages of the full white citizens And maintaining the sub
ordination of nonwhites. Correspondingly, thc "consent" ex
pected of the white eitizens is in part coneep tualized as a
consem, whether ",,-plieit or t ac it, to thc racial order, to white
supremacy, whateould be co.lled Whitenc.s. To the extent rho:t
those phemny picaUy/genealogieally/culturaHy categorized as
white fail (0 li"c up to (he CIVic and political responsibilities
of Whiteness, they <lre in d e re liction of their duties as citizens.
From the inception, th en, race is in no way an "afterthought,"
a "dev iatio n " from ostensibly raceless Western ideals, but
rather a central sh apin g constitucnt of those ideals.
In the social ContraCt naciition, there are two main possible
- relations between the moral eontraet and the po l itical con
trllct. On the firs t view, the motal contract represents preex
istmg o b jee ti vist mOlality Itheological or secul(1Ij and thus
constrains the terms of the political contra<:;t. This is the view
fo un d in Locke and Kant_ In oLl;cr words, there is an Qbjeetive
moral code in thc state of nature itself, even if the.tc arc n o
f
policemen and judges to en orce it. So any society, govern
ment, and legal system that arc estabHshed should be based
on th:n moral code. On the second view, the political c on tr a et
cremes morality as a conventionalist set of rules. So there is
no independent objective moral criterion for judging one moral
( code to be superior to another or for ind icti ng il society's
established morality as uniust. On this conception, whieh is
famously attributed to Hobbes, morality is JUSt a set of rules
for expediting the rational pursuit and coordination of our own
14
OVERVIEW
interests without con.fliet with those other people who are
doing d.e slime thing.5
The Racial Contract can ttcco mmodate both version s , but
as it is the former version (the contract as described in Locke
and Kant) rather than the latter version ,the contraet as de
scribed in Hobbesl which repre sents the mainstream of t he
contract tradition, t fceus on that on e.6 Here, the good polity
is taken to rest on a precx:lsting moral fouu datio n, Obviously,
this is 11 far more attraetive conception of a political system
than Hohbes1s view. The ideal o f an obje eti l y just polis to
which we should aspire in out political activism goes back in
the Western tradition all the Way to Plato. In the medieval
Christian woddview which continued to influence eon
tr o:c rarhmism well into thc modern period, there is a "natural
law" immanent in the str ucture of the universe which is sup
posed to direet us moraIly in striving for thjs ideal.' rFor the
later, secular versions of contr3-ctllriatrisn1, the idea would
simply be that people have rights and d uties even ill the state
ot nature beeause of their nature as human bei n gs.) So it is
wrong to s teal, rape, kin in the state of nature even if there
arc no IHlman laws written down saying it is wrong. These
moml pr inciples must constrain the human laws that are made
and the eivH rights that are assigned once the polity is estab
lished. In part, then, the political COntract simply' codifies a
morality that already exists, writing it down and filliilg in the
details, so we don't have to rely on a divinely'irnplanted moral
sense, or conscience, whose perceptions may on occasion be
distorted by self-interest. W hat is right and wrong, just and
unjust, in socicty will largely be determined by whllt is right
and wrong, just and unjust, in the state of natmc.
The character 01 this ob jeetive moral foundation is therefore
obviously cruciaL For the mainstream of the eo ntm ctllrian
tradition, it is the freedom and equality of all men in the
15

Etaw of nature" As Locke writes in the Second Treatise, "To
understand Political Power right, and derive it from its Origi
nal, we must consider what State all Men arc naturally ius and
that is, a Statc of petfect Freedom to order their Actions.... A
StaW also of Equality. wherein ali the Power and ,unsdicrion
is reciprocal, no one having more than another." For Kant,
similarly, it isourequal moral personhood, ContractarLanisUl
is {supposedly) oommitted to moral egalitarianism, the moral
equality ol all men, the notion that the imerests of all men
matter equally and all men must have equal rights, Thus,
contractarianism is also committed to a prineipled and loumia
t:onal opposition to the traditionalist hierarchical ideology of
the old feudal order, the ideology of inhereut ascribed s:mU$
and natural subordination, It is this language of equalIty which
echoes in the American and French Revolutions, thc Ded:ml'
tion of Independence, and the Declatation of the Rights of
Man. Alld il is dus moral egalitarianism that must be rctniued
in the allocation of rights aua liberdes in civil society, When
in a modern Western society people insist on their rights atl;:]
freedoms and xpress their outrage at not beIng treated equally,
it is to these classie ideas that, whethe:t they know it or not,
they are appeDling.
But as we wm sec in greater detail later on, the color-coded
l
morality ot the Racial ContrAct restricts the possession of this
. natural freedom and equality to wmte men. By virtue of their
complete nonrecognition, or at best inadequate, myopic reoog-
nition, Ot the duties of natural law, nonwhire..<1 arc approprhnely
relegated to a lower rung on the moraUadder (the Great ChHin
of 13dng).1 They arc designDted as born unfree and unequal.
A partitioned social ontology is therefore created, a universe
divided between persons and racial subpersons, Umer-
mtmscbun, who may variously be black, red, brown, ydlow
slaves, aborigines, colonial po pulations - but who are collec-
16
CVEflV;EW
tively appropriately known as "subjeet races" And these
subpersons-niggers, mjuns, ehinks, wogs, greasers, blaeruel
OWSt kaIRrs, coohes, abos, dinks, googoos, gooks-are biologi.
cally destined never to penetrate the normative rights ceiling
estabHshed lor them below white persous. Henceforth, then,
whether openly admitted ot not, it is taken for &'!anted that
the grand ethical theories propounded in the development of
Western moral and political thought are of restricted scope,
explicitly or imphdtly intended by their proponei\ts to b e
restricted to persons, whites. The terms of the Ratial Contraet
"
set the parameters for white morality as a whole, $0 that
competing Lockean and Kantian contrnctarian theones of
natural rights and duties, or later aJ1tieontractarian theories
such as nineteenth-eentury utilitarianism, are all limited by
its stipulations.
Finally, the Racial Contract requires its own peculiar moral
and empirical epistemology, its norms and procedures for de
termining what COunts as moral and factual knowledge of the
wodd. In the standard accounts of contractarianisrn it is not
usual to speak of there being an "epistcmologiea1" cammet,
hut there is an epistemology assoeiated with contractarianism J
in the form of naturaf law. This provides us with a moral
compass, whethet in the traditional version of Locke-the
light of re.1son implanted in us by God 50- we ean discern
objective right and wrong-ar in the revisionist version of
Hobbes---the ability to assess the objectively optimal pruden
tial eourseofaetion ,and whatlt requires of us forsell-interested
cooperation with others. So through our natural rnculties we
come to kn ow reality in both its factual and valuational as
pects, the way things objeetively are and what is objectively -
good or bad about them, I suggest wc can think or this as an
idealized consenSus about cognitive norms and, in this respect,
an agreement or "eontract" oisorts. There is an understanding
17
frE RACIAL COTf!ACT
about what counts as a correct, objective illtcrpl'etaton Of the
world, and for agreeing to this view, one is {"contractUally";
granced full eognitive standingjn the polity, the oHidal epistc
mic community.!l
Bue/or the Racial Contraet things nre necessanly more com
plieated. The requirements of "objective" cognition, foctual
and mOlo}. m a raeial poll ty are in a sense more demonding
in that officially sanctioned reality is divergent from actual
reality. So here, it could be said, one has an agreement to
misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world
wrongly, but with the assurance that this set or mistaken
perceptions will be validated by white epistcmic authority,
whether religious or secular,
Thus in effect. on matters related to race, the Racial Con
tract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epIstemology,
an epis t em olo gy ofignorance, a particular pattern of localized
and global cognitive dys/unctlOns (which are psychologically
and SOCially /ullctional), producing tlw ironic outcome that
whites Will iJ1general be unable to understand the world they
themselves hove made, Part of what it menns to be constructed
as "white" [the metamorphosis of the sociopolitical contract),
part of what it requires to achieve Whiteness, success tully
to beeome a white person (one imagines a ceremony with
certificates attending the successful rite of passage: "Con
gratulations, you're now an official white person!"), is a cogni
tive model that precludes self-transparency and genuine
understanding of soeial realities. To a significant extent, then,
white signatories will live in an invented delusional world,
a r acial antasyhmd, a "eonsensu<tl hallUcination," to quote
William Gibson's famous characterization of cybersp.lce,
though this particular hallucination IS located in real space.\!
There will be white mythologies, invented Orients, invented
Airicas, invented Americas, with a correspondingly fabricated
18
OVERVIEW
population, countries that never were, inhabited by people
who never were-CaHbans and Tontos, Man Fridays and
Sambas-hut who attain a virtual reality through thelr exis
tence in travelers' tales, folk myth, popular and highbrow fic
tion, colomal reports, schol arly theory, Hollywood cinema,
living in the white imagination and determinedly imposed on
their <tlarrned real-life counterparts"l One could say then, as a
general rule, that white misunderstanding, misrepresentation,
evasion, and selfdeception on matters related to race_ are
among the most pervasive mental phenomena o!'the past few
hundred ars, a cognitive and, moral eoonomy psychically
required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement. And
these phenomena are in no way accidental. hut prescribed b y
the terms o f the Racial Contract, which requires a certain
schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities in OI'der to
establish and maintain the white polity_
Tho Racial Conlract Is a historical actuality.
Thc social contract in its modern version 1)(IS iong since
, given up any pretensions to be able to explain the historical
origins of sodety and the state. Whereas thc classic con
tractarians were engaged in a project hoth descriptive and
prescriptive, the modern Rawlsinsplrcd eontract is purely a
prescriptive thought experiment, And even Patcrnan's Sexual
Contnlet, though its focus is the rcal rother than the ideal! is
not meant as a literal account of what men in 4004 B.C. decided
to do on the plains of: Mesopotamia, Whatever aeeounts for
what Frederick Engels onee ealled "the world historical de/eat
0/ the female sex"a-whether the d cve10pm en t of an economic
surplus, as he theorized, Or the male dlsoovery of the capadty
to rape and the female disadvantage of being the childbearing
19
 THE P}'CIAL CO\TP.ACT
half of the species, as radical feminists have argued-it is
dearly lost in antiquity.
By contraSt, ironically, the Racial Contr<lct, "never so far as
i know explored as sueh, has thc best claim to be1ns;m actual
historical fact. Far from being lost in the mists of the a.ges, it
is clearly historically locatable i n the series of events marking
the creation of the modern world by European colonialism
and the voyages of "discovery" now increasingly and more
approptiately called expeditions of conquest. The Columbian
quinccntellary a few years ago, with its accompanying debates,
polemics, controversies, counterdemonstrations, and out
pourings of revisionist literature, confronted many whites
with the uncomfortable fact, hardly discussed in mainstream
moral and political theory, that we live in a world whjcll has
been foundationally shaped for thc past five hundred years
by rhe realities of European domination and the gradual COll
solidation of global white SUptcma Thus not only is the
Racial Contract "real," but-whereas the social com tact is
charaeteristically taken to be estahlishmg the legjtlmacy of
the nation-stllre, and codifying motality and law within jts
t boundaries,--the Racial Contract is global, involving a tec,
tonic shift of the ethicojurldieal basis of the plal!et as a whote,
the division oj the world, as jeau-Paul Sattre put it long ago,
be1:l\feen "mel!" and "natives, "IS
Europeans thereby emerge as "the lords of humau kind,"
the "lords of all the world.." with the increasing power to
determine the standing of the non.Europeans who a'ce th eir
subjects.l Although no single act literally corrcsponds to the
drawing up and signiug of a contract, there is a series of acts-
papal bulls and other theolOgical pronouucementSi European
discussions about colonialism, "discovery, " and intetnational
law; pacts, treaties, and legal decisions; academic and popular
debates about the humanity of nonwhites; the establishment
,.
O\'lW:r.w
of fomtalized legal structutes of diffetential treatment; and
thc routinizatlon of informal illegal or quasi-legal practices
effectively sanctioned by the complicity of silence and govern
ment fai lure to intervene and punish perpetra:torswhich col
lectively can be seen, not just metaphoricaUy but close to
literally, as its conceptual, juridical, and normative equivalent_
Anthony Pagden suuests that a diVision of the European
empires in:o their main temporal periods should recognize
"two distinct, but interdependent histories'l: the colonization
of the Americas, 1492 to the 1830S, and the oi;cupatiol of
Asia, Africa, and thc Pacific, 1730$ to the period after World
War fl. If In the first period, it was, to hcgin with, the nature
and mor<ll status of {hc Native Americans that primarily had
to be determined, and then that of the imported African slaves
whose labor was tequircd to build thls "New World." In the
secoud period, eulnunating in for mal Eutopean eoloo1al rule
over most of :he world by thc early twentieth CCntury, it was
the char-deter of colonial peoples that becam.e cruciaL But in
an cases "nee" is the common conceptual denominator that
gradually came to signify the respective global statuses of
superiority and inferiority, privilege and subordination. There
is an opposition of us against them with multiple overlapping
dimensions: EurolJeans versus non-Europeans tgeography), civ
ilized versus wild,lsavage/barbarians lculture!, Cluishaus ver
sus heathens :religionl. But they all eventually coalesced Inw
the basic opposition of white versus nonwhite.
A Lumbee Indian legal scholar, Robert WIlliams, has traced
the c...olution of the Western Jegal ptL'>ition on the tights of
native peoples from its medieval antecedents to the beginnings
of the m.odcrn pe riod, showiug how it is consiStently based
on the assumption of "the rightness and neeessity of subjugat
iog and assimilating other peoples to Ithe Europeanl
woridview. <l.!; Initially the intellectual framework was a thco-
21
 TP.5 MOt.l CONTRACT
logical one, with nonnlltivc inelusion and exclusion manifest .
iug itself as che demarcation between Christians and hearhens.
The pope's powers over the SOCietas Christiana, the universal
Christian commonwealth, were seen as "extending not only
over aU Christians withIn the universal commonwealth, hut
over untegenetatcd hearhens and infidels as well,It and dus
policy would subsequently underwrite not merely the Cru
sades "gainst Islam but the later voyages to rhe Ameneas.
Sometimes papal pronouncements did grant rights and ratio
nality to nonbelievers. As a resuit of dealing with the Mongols
in the thirteenth eentury, for example) Pope Innocent IV "con
ceded that infidels and hC<lthens possessed rhe natural taw
right to eleet their own secular leaders, JJ and Pope Paul ill's
famous Sublimis Deus itS37) stated that Native Amer:'cans
were rational beings, not to be rreared as "dumb brutes created
[or our serviee" bur "as truly men . . . capable of understanding
the Co.tholie faith.11l But as Williams pOints oue, the latter
qU<lliIicntion was always erucial. A Eurocentricolly normed
coneepUon of rationality made it coexrensive with aeceptanee
of the Christi<ln message, 50 that rejeetion was proof of bcs
.ti"l irrationality.
....
()
Even more remarkably, in rhe case of Native Ametienns
this <lceeptance was to be signaled by their agreement to thc
Reql1ctimiento, a long statCInent read aloud to them in, of
course, a language they did not undetst<md, failing which mi'
sent a just war eould lawfully be waged ag:<inst them Ul One
author Wtltes:
The requeri:miel1!o is the ptorotypiC<l1 example of text jw;.
dfying conquest. InformingtheIndians that rheir ]nds ','lere
entrusted by Christ to the pope and rhenee to the kings of
Spo.in, the document offers freedom Iron sla",ety fot rhose
Indians who accept Spanish rule. Even though it wasentirely
22
OVERVIEW
incomprehcnsib,e to ., nonSpanish 'PCaker, reading tllp
docu:nent pIOvided sufficient justification for dispossession
of land and immediate ensl:wement of the indigenous pen_ l
pie. [Bartolome de] Las Casas's famous comment on the
I
requerJmiento was tbar one does not know "v.rhethe.r to :'
l'
I'Hlgh or cry at rhe absurdity of jr." , . , Wlulc appearing to
respect "rights" the requerimiento, in faet, takes them
In effect, then, the Catholic Church's deelaraions cither for
mally legitimated conquest 'or could be easily circumvented
where a weak prim., facie moral barrier was erected.
The growth of the Enlightenment and the rise of secnlarism
did not cballenge this stri1tegic dichotomization (Christian/
infidel) so much as translate it into othcr forms. Philip C\ll'tin
refers to the characteristic "exceptionalism in Euxopcan
thought flbout the non-West," "a conception of the wodd
largely based on self-identifieation-and identification of 'the
other people."12Z Similarly, Pierre van den Berghc describes the
"Enlightenment diehotomization'" of the normative theories
of the period.2.1 "Race" gradually bccat:1e the foroal marker of
chis differentiated status, replacing the religious divide (whose
disadvamagc, after illl, was that it could always be overcome
through conversion). Thus a eategory crysrallized',over time
in European rhought to represent entities who arc humanoid
but not fully human i"sa:vages, tI " barbarians") and who are
identified as such by being members of,the general set of
nonwhire races. Influenced by the ancient Roman distinction
between the civllized within and the barbarians outside the
empire, the distinction between full and questionmark hu
mans, Europeans set up a two-tiered moral code with onc set
of rules for whires and another for nonwhltes.14
Co:respondingly, various moral and legal doctrines were
23
 THE flAC1AL CONTRACT OVEHViE\,/

bud fOf lUOfe than u centuty before b een regarded as heings.

)
propounded which eall be seen as specific manifcst<ltions nnd
ins;:amiarions, app rop ri atciy ad}ustcd to circumst:mces, of rhe oi an inferior order, and altogetber unfit to llSSOClllte with

o\<emrehing Racial Contract. These \..'erc specific subsidi,uy the white race, either in sodal or polidcal relations, and so
cotttntets designcd for different modes of exploiting the re far inferjor, that they had no rights which the white mill!
sourees and peoples of the rest of the world for Europe the was honnd to respect; find that the negro might justly and

expropriation contracr, the slavery contract, the colonillI lawfully be redu ced to slavery fot his benefit. " , _ This opin

conrraet. lOn was llt thllt time fixed and universal in the civilized
The "Doctrine of Discovery," for example, what Wi lliam s ponion of the whitc racc. It was regurded as an axiom in
idemifies as the "paradigmatic tenet informing and derer morals;1s well as in politics, which no one thQtlghtof disput
mining contemporary European legal djscourse respecting re ing, or supposed to be open to dispute.;

lations with Western tribal societies, II was central to thc

c:<q)wpriation cOntra eL:l5 The American Justice Joseph Story ( FinaHYJ there is the colomal. contract, which l eg itiI.ruitcd

glossed jt as granting Europeans .1 Eu r opcan rule ovcr the na:ion s in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.

I
Consid er, for ins tance, this wonderful examplc, almOSt litef

an absolute dominion over the whole rcnitories afterwards any "contmctarbm" in character, hom th e French imperial.

occupied by them, not in vittue of uny conquest of, or ces theorist Jnles Harmund \ r845-19.21), who d evised the notion
of association: .
sion by, the Indian natives, bUt as it right D-equired by
discovery_ . . " The t itle of the Il)dians was nol tre:ltcd as
il right of propcr ty and dominion, but tiS a mere right 01
Expansion by conquest, however necessary, seems espe

oceupancy. As infidels, heathens, ,\lnd saVD-gcs, theywerc not cially unjust and distUrbing to the conscience of
allowed to possess :he prerogatives belonging to absolute, demoeracies, , . . Dut to transpose democratic institutions
smrcre:gn, and independent nations. The territory over into 5llch a setting is aberrant nonsense. Tiro subject people

which thcy wandered, tlr.d whieh they used for thcir tflmpe afC nor and cannot become citizens in the democratic sense

tary and fugjtive: purposcs, was, in respcet to Christj;ms, of the term " . " . It is necessary, then, to accept as a prinClple

deemed as if ir were inhabited only by brute animaIs"] and point of departure tbe faet that there is a hierarchy of
races and civiJiutioll.$, ;md that we belong to tbe superior
Similarly. contract gave Europeans the right to
the slavery race and dvilization. , . . The basic legitimation of conques t

enslave NativeAmericans and Africans at a t ime when slavery ovcr native pcoples is the convietion of om superiority, not

was dead or dying out in Europe, based on doctrines of the merely our metharuc.al, economic, .and military superiority,

inherent inferiority of these peoples. A classic Statement of but our mora l superiority. OUJ'dignity rests on rha t quality ,
the slavery ronuilct is the 1857 DIed Scott v. SfIJ'l/ord U.S. and it underli es our right to direct the res t of humanity,

Supreme Court decision of Chief Justiee R.oger Taney, which

stilted that blacks What js therefore necessary is a ''''Contract'' of Association":

24 25
THe MCtAl COtlTHAGT
Whbout blling into Rousseauan reveries, it is worth noting
thm assoeiation implies a concrnct, and this idell, though
nothing more than an illustration, js more appropnatcly
applied to,the coexistence of tWO profoundly different soelt,:.
des thrown sharply and artifidnlly into contact than it is
to the single society formed by naturAl proeesses whlch
Rousseau envisaged. This is how the terms of tbis implicit
agreement c;m be conceived. The Europc;;m conqueror
hrings order, foresight, and sccurity to a human society
which, though ardently aspiring for these rund,;l1nental va!
ues w:irhaut: which no community CAn make progress, still
ll1cks the aptitude to achieve thcm [rom wi.thin itself. ,
Wah these mental and material instruments, wbich :it
:llcked and now receives, it gaius the idea and <1mbidon for
a better existence, and thc meanS of achieving it. We will
obey you, say the subjects, if you begin by proving yourself
worthy, We will obey you if yOU can succeed in convincing
us of the superiority of that c:iviliziltion of whieh you t:llk
so much.""
Indian laws, slave codes, and colonial native acrs formally
codified the subordinate status 01 nonwhites and (ostensiblyl
xcgulated ther rreatUlent, creating a juridical space fox non
Europeans as a sepax;lte category of beings, So even if there
waS sometimes an attempt to prevent "abuses" {and these
codes were honored far more often in the breach than the
observance!, the point is that " abuse" as a concept presupposes
J
as a norm the legitimacy of the subordination. Slavery and
colonialism arenol conceived as wrong in their denial of auron
omy to persons; whar is wrong is the improper administration
01 these regimes.
[t would be g fundamental error, then-a potnt to which 1
wiH n:tum-'to see racism as anomalous, a mysterious devia
2 27
OVERvlEr,l
,ion from European Enlightenment hutTulnism. Racher, it
needs to be realized that, in keeping with the: Roman prece
dent, European humanism usually meant thatonlyEuropeans
were buman. European moral and political theory, like: Euro
pean thought in general, developed within the hamework ot
the Racial Contract and, as a r u le, took it for gt,mted. As
Edward Said points out in Culture and Imperialism, \\'C must
not see cnltute as "antIseptically quarantined from its worldly
afffiiations." But this occupational blindness has in fact in
fected mos: "professional humanists" land ecrtauHy most phi
losophersj, so that "as a result [they are] unable to make the
eonnectio:r. between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of prac,
tiees such as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and
imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poctry, Bction,
philosophY of the society that engages in these practiccs on
the other. ,m By the ninetecnth century, conventional white
opinion casually assumed the uncontroversial vali&ty of,a
hierarchy of "higher" and "lower," "master" and "subject"
races, for whom, it is obvious, different rules must a.pply.
The modern world was thus expressly creaccd as a racially
hierarchical poli ty, glohally dominated by EutOpeans, A 1969
Foreign AffaiIs article WOrth. rereading today reminds us that
as late as the 1940$ the world "was still by and Jarge a \Vestern
white-dominated worJd. The long-established patterns of
white power and nonwhite non-power wese still the generally
aee.epted order of things. All thc accompanying assumptions
;lnd mythologies about r,;tee and color were still mostly taken
for granted. . _ . (Wlhite supremacy was a generally assumed
and accepted state of affairs in the United States as well as
in Europe's empires!'.;!'; But statements or sueh frankness are
rare or nonexiStent in mainsue.;tm white opinion today, whieh
generally seeks to rewrite the past so as to deny or minlm(ze
the obvious bct of global white domination.
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
Yet the United States itsclC of course, is a whitc settler
st,!te on territory expropria.ted from its aborginal inhabitants
thl'Ough a combi nation of milit ar y force, disease, and a "cen
tury of dishonor" of broken uea:i:es.): The expropriation In
valved literal genocide fa word now unfortuuately devalued
by h)tpcrbolic overuse) of a kind that some recen revisionist
historians have argued needs to be seen as compara.bIe to the
Third Reich'sP Washington, Father of the Nationt was, under
standably, known somewbRt differently co the Senecas as
"Tmvn Destroyer. ".l.i In the DeclAration of Independence, JcI.
terson characterized Native Americans as "mctciless Indian
Savages," and in the Consti tution, blacks, of course , appear
only obliquely, through the famous "60 percen t so2ution."
Thus, as Ri chard Drinnon concludes: "ihcFr:llncrs mnnifcsrly
established a government under which non.Europcans were
not men created equal-in the white polity . . , they were
nonpeoples." Though on ,a smlll ler scale and not always so
ruthlessly (or, in thc case of New Zealand, because of more
successful indi genous resistance], whnt are standardly elassi
fied as the other wbite settler states-for example, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia, ,and South Africawere all
founded on similar polieies; the extermination, displacement,
andiorherding onto rcservations of the aboriginal populatlou,t>
Plerre 'fan den Bcrghe bas coined tbe illuminatiug pbrase "Her
renvolk democracies" to deseribe these politics, which cap.
tures perfectly the dichotomization of the Rneial ContracL;&
Their subsequent evolution has been somewhat different, hut
defeuders of South Africa's system of apartbeid often af!,'ued
that u.s. criticjsm was hypocritical in light of its own history
of jim crow, especially since de facto segregatlon remains sui
fieicndy entrenched that even today, forty yea.rs after Brown
v. Board of Education, tWO Americ,m SOciologists ean til Ie
th ei r srudy American ApartheidY ihe racist record of preHb.
28
OVERVIEW
emtion Rhodesia Inow Zimhabwe) and South AIric is well
known, not so familiar may be the faet that the United States,
,
Canada, and Australia all maintained "whitej immigration
policies until a few decades ago, aud uative peoples in all three
countries suffer high poverty, infant mortality, and suicide
rates.
Elsewhere, in latin America, Asia, And Alriea, large pans
of the worM were colonized, that is, formally brought: under
the :rule of one or another of the EUfOpe,1n powers tor, lat er,
Ll)e United StatesJ: the early Spanish :rod Ponugusc empires
in the Amerieas, the PluJlppmes, and south Asia; the jealous
competition from Britain, France, nnd HoUand; the British
conquest of India; the French expansion i nto Algeria and Indo
cbina ; the Duteb advance into Indonesi.a; the Opium Wars
against Chlna; the late nineteenth-century IIscr,amble for AI
rica"; the U.S. war against Spam, seizure ufCuba, Puerto Rico,
and the Philippines, and altJtexlltion of Hawa.ii.J The pace of
ehangc this eentUl'y has beeu sn dramatic that it is easy to
forget that less than a hundred years ago, in I9I4, "EUl'ope
beld agrand total of roughly 8 5 pereent of the earth as colonies,
protee tora tes, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths,
No other a ssocia ted set of eolomes in hi story was as large,
none so totally dOminated, none so unequal in power to the
Western metropolls.";w One could say that the Racial Contract
ereates a. mmsnational white polity, a virtual commun ity of
people linked by their eictzenship ln Europe at home and abroad
(Europe proper, tbe colonial greater EUl'ope, And the "frag
ments" of Euro-America, Eurn Austrah a, etc.!, and constituted
in opposition to their indigenous subjects, In most of Africa
flnd Asia, where colonia! rule ended only alter World War n,
rigid "color bars" maintained the separation between Europe,
ans and indigenes. As European, as white, one knew oneseH
to be a memher of the superior race, one's skin being one's
29
nlE C:fo,t CONTMC
passport: "Whatever a white man did must in some grotesque
fashion be 'civilized,"'.\!) 50 rhough there were local variations
in the Racial Contrllct, depending on circumstances and the
partICular mode of exploitation-Jor example, a bipolar racial
system in the (Anglo) United States, llS agains t a subtler color
hierarchy in IIberianJ latin Ameriea-lt remains the Cilse dUll
the white tribe, as the global representative of civiliztion and
modetnity, is generally on top of the social pytamid.'!
We live, then, in a wotld buHt on the Racial Contract. That
we do lS simultaneously quite obvious if yon think abou: it
{the dates and details of colonial conquest, the constitutions
of these states and their exelusionary juridical mechanisms,
the histories of oHkial racist ideologies, the battles against
slavery and eoloniaHs01, the formal and informal structures
of disctimination, are all within recent historieal mcmory
lind, or course, massively documented in otherdisciplinesl and
nonobvlous, since most whites don't think about it or don't
think about it as the outcome Or a history of political apples
sian but rather as just " th e way things are." iI/you sa.y we're
<Ill over the world because we conquered the world? Why
would you put it thtlt wayl'''iIn the Treaty of Tordesillas ( 1494,1
whieh divided rhe worldbetween Spain and Portugal, the Vall,l
dolid ISpainj Conference \ 1 5 50-1 S 5 1 ) to decide whetber Native
Americans were really human, the laler debates over Afriean
siavery and abolitionism, the Berlin Conference \ISS4-ISS51
to partldon Africa, the vurious inrer-European pacts, treaties,
and informal arrangements O!l policing their eolonies, the
post-World War I discussions in Versailles after a war to makc
the world stlfe for democracy-we see for should sec) with
complete clarity a world bemg governed by white people. 50
though there is als!) internal conflict-disagreements, battles,
cve.,'1 world wars-the dominant movers und shapers will be
Europeans at home and abroad, with non-Europea.ns lining up
30
QVERVIE',I(
toRght under theirrcspectivebanncts, and thes)'stemof white
domination itself rarely being challenged. !The exception, of
course, is Japan, which esC4lpeO colonization, and so for most
of the twenticth eentury has had a shifting and ambivalent
relationship with the global white polity,) The legacy of this
world is, of course, still with us today, in the economic, politi
cal, and cultural domination of the planet by Europeans .and
their descendants. The fact that this racial structure, clearly
political in character, and the struggle against it, equally so,
have not for the most pan been decmed approp!iate subject
matter for mainstream AngloAmerican political philosophy
and the fact that rhe very eoncepts hegemonic in the discipline
are re1raetory to an understanding Ot these realities, rcveal at
best, a disturbingprovineialisfil and an ahistoricity profoundly
at odds with the radically foundational questioning on which
philosophy prides itself and, at worst, .l complicity with the
terms of the Racial Contrae itself, .
,:
TIle- Raelal Contract it an exploitation conlruel that ereates global \
European economic dominalion and nalfonal while racial prlllilege. /
The classic social contract, as I have detailed, is prjmarily
ffioral/polirical ln nature, But it is also economic in the back
ground sense that the point of leaving the state of nature is \
,
.
in pan to secure a stable environment for the industrious I
appropriation of the world. IAftcr all, one famous dcnition (
or polities is [hat it is about who gets what and why.) Thus even
in Locke's motalized state of nature, whexc people generally do
J
obey natural law, h e is concerned abou t the safety of private
pIOfW.Ity, indeed proclaiming that "the great and chief end
therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting
themselves under GO\'crnmcnt, is the Preservation of their
31
THE nACIAL CONTFlACi
.
'. .
,
Property. '"',1! And j n Hohhes's famously amoral and unsafe stll te
of nature, we are told that "there is no place for Indusuy;
bcclluse tbe fruit thercof lS uncertain; and consequently no
Culturc of the Earth!"! So part of the point of bringing sociery
into existence, with Its laws and enforcers of the law, is to
protect what you have accumul<lted.
What, then, is the nature of the economic system of rhe
new societY? The generul contract docs not itself prescribe
a particular model or p<lrtieular schedule of property rights,
requiring only that the " equality" in the prepolitical State be
somehow preservcd. This provision may be ,,'arionsly inter
preted as a self-interested sunendcr to an absolutist Hobbesian
government that itseH determines property rights,. or a Lock
C<1n insIstence that private property accumulated in thc moral
ized state of nature be respected by thc constitutionalist
gov(,!mment_ Or more radicaJ political theorists, such as social
ists and feminists, might argue th<it state-af-nature equality
actually mandates elass or gender economic egalitarianism in
society. So, different political interpretations oj the initial
mora! egalitarianism call he advaneed, but the genetal back
grollnd idea is that lht! equality of 1mman beings in the st;\te
o( na.turc is somehow (whether as equality of opportunity or
as equality or outcome) supposed to carry ovet into the econ
omy of the created sociopolitical order, leading to a system of
voluntary human intcrcourse andcxehange in which exploita
tion is precluded.
By contrast, the economic dimension of the Racial Contract
is the most salient, foreground rather than background, since
the RHcial Comraet is calculatedly aimed at economic exploi
tation. The whole point of estahlishing a mora.l hicnlrcby (md
juridically partitioning the polity according to rae<:. is to secure
and legitimate the privileging nf those individuals de:sigl)llted
;IS white/persons and the exploitation of those individuals de.'l
OVERVIEW
ignared as nonwbitefsubpcrsons. There are other benefits ae
eming hom the Racial Contmctr-far greater political
inr1uence, cultural hegemony, the psychic payoff that comes
from knowil1,g one is a member of the HerrerJvolk (what
w. E. B. Du Bois onee called "rhc wages of whitencss"J0i4-but
he botrom line is material advantage. Globally, the Racial
Contract creates Europe as the continent that dominates the
world/ locally, within Europe and the other continents, it desig
nates Europeans (1.5 the privileged [;ICC.
The challenge of explaining what has been called "the E.uro
pean milaele"-tbe rise of E.urope to global domination-has.
long exercised both academic and lay opinion"; How is it that
a iormerly petipheral legion on the outskirts of the Asian land
mass, at the far edge of the trade routes, remote from the grCiit
civilizations of Islam and the East, was ahle in a century or
tWO to tlchicve globaL political and ceonontic dominance? The
explanations historically given hy Europeans themselves have
varied tremendously, from the straightforwardly racist and
geographically determinist to thc more subtly environmental
ist and cultutalisL But what they have ail had in common,
even those influenced by Marxism, is their tendency to depict
this development as essentially autochthonous, their tendency
to privilege some set of internal variahles and cQrrespondingly
downplay at ignore altogether the role of colonial conquest
and Africa.n slavery. Europe made it on its own, it is said,
becouse of rhc peculiar characteristics of Europe and
Europeans,
Thus wherc<ls no reputable historian today would espouse
the frankly biojogistie theories of the past, which made Euro
peans :iu both pre- and post.Darwinian accountsl inherently
the most advanced race, ascomrasted with the oockw3.td/le&'>
evolved rnees clsewhere, the thesis of European specialness
and exccpdonaJism is still presupposed, It is still assumed that
TH RACIAL CONTRACT
rationalism and science, innovativcness llnd inventiveness
found their special home here. as against the intellectual stag
nation and traditiona.lism of the rest of the world, so that
Europe was thcrefore destined in advancc to occupy the special.
position in global histoty it 11.<15. james maur calls this the
theory, or "supet-theory" (an umbrella coveting many dHfcr.
ent versions: theological, cultUral, bioiogistic, geograpruC<ll,
technological, etc i, oi "Eurocenttic diffuslOnism," aceotding
to which European progrcss is seen as "natural" andasymmet.
rlcally determinam of lhe fate of non-Europe."" Similarly, San
dra Harding, in het anthology on the "racial" economy of
science, cites " the aSSllITlption that Europe functions autono
mously ftom mher PJrtS 01 rhe world; that Europe is its own
origin, final end, and agent; and that EurOj)c and people of
European descent in the Americas and elsewhere owe nothing
to the rest of the world.""
Unsurprisingly, black and Third World thcorisrs have tr<l.di
tionally dissented from this notion of happy divine or natural
Emope\lll dispensation, They h<l.ve claimed, <Itdte to rhe eon
trMY, that there is a cnleial causal connection between Em'o
pelln advance <lnd the unhappy l\lte of the rest of the world.
One classic example of such scholarship 1:rom a half century
\lgo was the Caribbean hisrorian Eric Williams's Capitalism
and Slavery. which argued that the profits/rom Airicanslavery
he:ped romake theindusuiuJ revolutlonpossjl!Ie, sotbatimcr
nalist :;ceoums were !und<lmentally mlstaken:'" And in recent
year., \vith dccolonizution, the rise of the New Left in thc
United St<ltes, and the entry of more alternative voices into
the academy, this challenge has deepened and broadened.
There are v\lrlations in thc lluthors' position$-for example,
Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, Andre Cunder Frank, Immanuel
WaHersteinfbut the basie theme is that the exploitation of
the empire (the bullion hom the great goM and silver mines
OIJERIJIEW
in Mexico and Peru, the profits from plantation- slavery, the
fortunes made by the colonial eompanies, the gencra social
and economic stimulus provided by the opening up of the
"New World") was to a greater or lesser cxtent crucial in
enabling and then consolidating the takeoff of what had previ
ously been an econornie backwater. It was hn {rom the ease
tl1at Europe was specially destined to assume economie hege
mony; therc wcre a number oi centers in Asia and Africa of
a eomparable le....el of development which could potentially
have evolved in the same way. Rut the Europc3:fj .u;eent closed
offthis developmentpathfor 9thets because it forcibly inserted
them into a coloniol network whose exploitative relations and
CXHi\eti....c mechanisms prvcnrcd autonomous growth.
Overall, then, colonialism "lies at the heart" of the rise of
Europe,'o The eeonom;,e unit of analysis needs to be Europe
as a whole, since it is not always the case that the eolonizing
nations dirccdy involved always benefited in the long term,
Impel'in! Spain, for example, still feudal in eharacter, suffered
massive inflation from its bullion iruports, But through trade
and fin<lneial exchange, others launched on the capit.:tlist path,
snch as Holland, profited. Internal national rivalries contin
ued, of course, but clris common identity b.:tsed on the trans
eontinental eJ(ploitation or rhe non.European world would in
many cases be politically crucial, generating a sense of Europe
as a cosmopolitan enrity engaged in a common enterprise,
underwritten by raec. As ViClOt Kiernan putS it, "Allcountrics
within the European orbit benefited howcver, as Adam Smith
[:oinrcd onto From eoJorual contributIons to a common stock
of wC$lth, bitterly as they mighr wrangle over ownership of
one territory or another, . . . iTlhete was a sense in which all
Europeans shared in a heightened sense of power engendercd
by the successes of any of them, as weU as in the pool of
,
material wealth , . . that the colonies produced/ $j
THE RAe:,,!.. C\ltlTMCI
Today, correspondingly, though formal decolonization has
taken place and in Atriea and Asia black, brown, and yellow
na:ivcs Me in office, ruling independent nations, the global
economy is essentially dominated by the former colonial pow.
ers, their offshoots !Euro-Unite:d States, Eum,C<Inada), and
their jnternationnl financial institutions, lending agencies, and
oorporntions IAs previously observed, the notablc cxception,
whose history confirms rthct than challenges the rule, is
Japan, which escaped colonization nnd, after rhe Meiji Rcstora
tion, successfully embarked on its own industrializarion.;
Thus one could say that the world is essentially dominated
by white capitaL Global figures on incomc and property owner.
ship are, oicourse, broken down nationaUy rather than raeially,
but if a ttansnational racial disag&'Tegation wcre to bc done, it
would reveal that whites control a percentagc of the world's
wealth grossly disproportIonate to rheir numbers, Since there
is no reason to think thar the ehasm betwecn First 1lUd Tbird
Worlds (which largely coincldes with rhis racial division) is
going to be bridged-vide the abjeet failure of various United
Nations plans from rhe "development decade" of the 1960s:
onward-it seems undeniable that for years to come, the lanet
will be white dOlUlnilted, With thc collapse of communlsm
and the defe<lt of Third World attempts to seek alternativc
paths, the West reigns supreme, as celebrated in a London
FiJUlUcir/1 Times headline: " The fall of the Soviet bloc has lell
the IMF and G7 to rule thc world and create a new imperial
age,Ml Economic structures have been set in place, causal
processes estnbllshed, whoseoutcomeis to pump wcalth from
one side of the globe to another, and which will continue to
work laIgeiy independently of the ill wHi/good will, racist!
antiracisr feelings of particular individuals. This globally
eolor-coded distribution of wealth and poverty has been pro-
3&
duced by the Rncial Contract and in turn reinforces adherence
to it in its signatories and benefieiaries.
Moreover, it is not mcrcly that Europe and the former white
settler states nre glohally dominant but that vtithin them,
where there is a significant nonwhite presence [indigenous
peopies, dcseendants of imported slaves, voluntary nonwhite
immigT<Ition), whi:es cominue to be privileged vis-;)-vis non
whites. The old structures of formal, de jure exelusion have
largely been dismantled, the old explicitly biologistic ideol
ogies ;argely abandoned5.l-the Racial Contrac; as will be dis
cussed Inter, is continually being rewritten-but oppor.tunities
for nonwhites, though they have expanded, remain below those
lor whites. The claim is not, 01 course, that all whites are
better off than aU nonwhites, but that, as a stati.stical generali
zation, the objeetive life ehances of whites arc significantly
better.
As an example, consider the United States. A series of books
has rccently documented the deeline of the integrationist
hopes raised by the r960s and the growing intransigence and
hostility of whitcs who think they have "done et'lough," de
spite the fa ct that the country continucs to be massively segre
gared, mcdian black family incomes havc begnn falling by
comparison to white amil y ineomes after some earHer cloSing
of thc gap, the soealled "black underclass" has basically been
written off, and reparations for slavery and postEmancipation
diser imination have never been paid, or, indeed, even seriously
considercd.='" Recem work on racial inequality by Melvin Oli
vcr imd Thomas Shapiro suggests that wealch is more 1m
portnnt than income in determining the likelihood of future
racial equalization, sinec it has a cumulative effect that is
passed down through jntcrgenerational transler, affecting life
chances and opportunities for one's children. Whereas in 19&8
black households earned sixty-two cents for every dollar
37
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
earned by white households, the comparative differential with
regard to wealth is mueh greater and, arguably, provides a
more realistically negative picture of the prospects for closing
the racial gap: "Whites possess nearly twelve times as mueh
median net worth as blacks, or 543,800 versus $3,700. In an
evcn starker contrast, perhaps, the average white household
controls 56,999 in net financial assets while the average blaek
household retains no NFA nest egg whatsoever./I Moreover,
the analytic focus on wealth rather than income exposes how
illusory the much-trumpeted risc of a " black middle class"
is: "Middle-class blacks, for cxample, earn seventy cents for
every dollar earned by middle-elass whites but they possess
only fifteen cents for every dollr of wealth held by middle
class whites." This huge disparity in white and black wealth
is not remotely contingent, aecidental, furtuitous; it is the
direct outcome of Amcrican state policy and the collusion
with it of the whitc citizenry. In eHect, "materially, whites
and blaeks constitute two nations, II;; the white nation being
constituted by the Amcrican Racial Contract in a relationship
of structured racial exploitation with the hlack (and, of course,
historically also the rcd) nation.
A collection of papers from panels organized in the 1980s
by the National Economic Associntion, the professional orga
nization of black eeonomists, provides some insight into the
mechanics and the magnitude of sueh exploitative transfers
and denials of opportunity to accumulate material and human
capital. It takcs as its title The Wealth of RlIces-an ironie
tributc to Adam Smith's famous book The Wealth of Nations
and analyzes thc diffcrent varieties of diserimination to which
blaeks have been subjected: slavery, employment discrimina
tion, wage discrimination, promotion discrimination, white
monopoly powcr discrimination against black capital, racial
price discrimination in eonsumer goods, housing, serviccs,
38
OVERVIEW
insurance, I!tc.06 Many of these, by their very nature, are diffi
cult to qu,mtifYi moreover, there arc eosrs in anguish and
suffer ing that ean never J;eally be compensated. Nonetheless,
those that do lend themselves to calculation offer some re
markable figures. (The figures are unfortunately dated; readers
should multiply by a faetor that takes fifteen years of inflation
into acconnt.) If one were to do a calculation of the cumulative
benefits (through eompound interest) from lahor market dis
erimination over the forty-year period from 1929 to 1969 and
adjust for inflatioll, then in r983 dollars, the figure would
be over $1.6 trillion.7 An estimate for the total of "diverted
income" from slavery, 1790 to 1860, compounded and trans
lated into 1983 dollars, would yield the sum of S2.1 trillion
to 54.7 trillion.5H And if one were to try to work out the
cumulative value, with compound interest, of unpaid slave
labor before 1863, underpayment since 1863, and denial of
opportunity to acquire land and natural resources available to
white settlers, then the total amount required to eompensate
bla cks 1/ could take more than the entire wealth of the
United States."59
So this gives an idea of the eentrality of racial exploitation
to the U.S. economy and the dimensions of the payoff for its
white beneficiaries from one nation's Raeial Contraet. But
this very centrality, these very dimensions render the topie
t,l boo, virtually undiscussed in the debates on justiee of most
white political theory. If tbere is such a baeklash against af
firmative action, what would the response be to the demand
for the interest on the unpaid forty aeres and <l mulel These
issues cannot be raised because they go to the heart of the real
nature of the polity and its strueruring by the Racial Contraet.
White moral theory's debates on justice in the state must
therefore inevitably have a somewhat fareieal au, sinee they
ignore the central injustice on whieh the state rests. lNo won-
39
der a hypothetical comroctarianism that evades the actual
circumstances of the polity's founding is preferred!)
Both gl.oinlHy and within particulur nations. then, white
people, Europeans and their descendants, con t inue to hcneflt
from the Racial Contra ct, which creates a world in their cuI.
tural image, political states diffcrentiully fllvoring their inter
ests, an econOmy strucrured n.round tJle rueh.l exploItation of
others and a mornl psyehoJogy Inot lust in whites but some
,
DETAILS
times in nonwhites alsol skewed consciously or unconsciously
toward pri....ileging them, ta.king the stiltus quo of differential

O
racial entitlement as normativelY Legitimate, and ,not to hc
inves tigated funher.

S
that gives us rhe overview. Let lIS now move to Il
cl oser examin:ul0n of the details ilnd workings of the
Racinl Contract: its norming of spaee and the rsub)pcr
son, its relation to the "offleial" soeial eontraet, and the terms
of its enforcement.

The Racial Gonlracl norms {and races] space, demarcating civil and
wild spaces.

Neither space nor the individual is usually an object of

explicit and detailed nanning for the mainstream social con
tract. Spa cc is JUSt them. t"ken for granted, and the individual
is ta citly posited as the White adult male, so that aU intHviduals
arc obviously equal. Bllt for the Racial Comract, space itself
and the individuals thcrem are not homogeneous; so explicit
normative distinctions necessarily have to be made. 1 will
treat the norming of space and the person separntely, though
exegesis i s complicated by the fact that they arc bound up
together. The norrning of space is partiaHy done in terms of
the racing 01 space, the depiction of Space as dominated by

40 41

THE ?ACIAL CONTRACT
indiViduals (whether persons o r suhpersons! oj it ccnain rAce.
At the some time, the norming of rhe individual is partially
nchicved by spacing tt, that is, representing it as imprinted
v/jth ,he characterlstics of a certain kind of SpaCe, So this.is
a mmually suPPOrting cnaracterlzlItion that, for subpersODs,
becomes a ci:rcuJar indietment: "You tile What you are in {Mrt
because you originllte hom a certain kind of space, and that
SpllCC has those propenies i n pan because it i s inhabited by
creotures like yoursc1L"
The supposedly abstract but actUally white social contract
characterizes IEuropeanl space basically as prcsociopolitical
:'( the sta tc of nature") and postsociopolitical :the locus oj Itcivil
society"J, But th,s characterization docs not reflect negatively
on the charaetcIlstics of the space itself or its denizerlS. This
spa ee is our space, a space in which we we white people) are
at home, a cozy domestic spaee. At a cettain Stage, !white;
Jlcople seeing the disadvantages of the state of nature volUntu
ily choose to lelive it, thenceforth estahlishing institutions
transforming its character. But th ere is nothing innate in the
space or rhe persons thllt eonnOles intrinsic defect.
By contrast, In loe social <:ontract's ilppucadon to nOll
Europe, where it becomes the Racial COiltract, both Spaee and
its inhabitants are a l ien. So this space and these indjvidl1als
need to be explicitly theorized about, since lir tUnis 011tj they
lirc both defective in a Wily that requires external intervention
to be redeemed \insoiar, that is, as redemption is possible).
Europeans, Ot ilt least fuB Europeans, were "civilized," and
thjs condition was manifested in the character of the SpaCes
they inhllhited,l Non-Europeans were "savagest " ilnd this cou
<litton was manifested in the character of the Spaces they
inhabited. Tn -fact, as has heen pointed out, this habitation is
captured in the etymology of "savage" itself, which derives
from the Latin silva, " wood, fJ so that the savage is thc wild
42
nET
man of the wood, sllvaticus, nomo sylvestr.L, the man
whose being wildness, wilderness, has so deeply penetrated
that the door to civilization, to the political, is barred) !You
can ta ke the Wild Man out or the wilderness,
hut you can't
is
take the wilderness out of thc Wild Man,) The Wild Man
o
a crucial figllIC (n medieval thought, Ul'::! domestic a lltIp de
lwithin Eutope) of civilization, and is one of the conceptual
anteeedents of the Inter cxtra-Eutopean "savages."l As Hayden
tes
White poillts out, tbe creation of the "Wild Man" iUustra
the
"the technique of ostensive self-definition by neg.lltion("4
eharacterization of oneself by reference to what one is not.
in
Who arc we! We are the nOllsnvnges, Thus it is really here,
the reallifc Racial Contract, as against the mythie al social
play
contract, rhat rhe "state of nature" and tOe "natural"
in the state of nature ,
their ,decisive theoretical role, They are
"found
and we are not . Englishmen, writes Roy HarveyPearce,
environmeht, b u t u neivi
in America ilot only ,m uncivilized
lized men-natural men, as it WIIS slI id, living in a
natutal
world."5
Correspondingly, ule Raeial Contract in its eatty ptecon
qUCSt versions mllSt neeessarily involve the pejorative charac
teriza tion of the spaces that need tamin& the spaces in whieh
the raeial polities arc eventu a lly going lO be eonstrueted. The
Raeial Contra cr is thus necessarily more openly material than
the socia ! conrract. These strange landscapes isa unlike those
at home:, this alien flesh [so different from out own!, must he
mapped and subordinated. Creating the eivil and rhe politieal
here thus requires an aetive spatial snuggle (this space is
resistant) against the savage and harharie/ an advaneing of the
frontier agai.nst opposition, a E.uropeanization 'Of the world.
"Europe,'-' as Mary Louise Pratt notesl 'Iearne to see itself as
a 'pJanerary process' rather than simply a regi'On of the world. "t
Spaee must be normed and raced at the macrolevel (entire
43
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
countries and eontinentsl, the loca] level :eity neighhorboods),
and ultimately even the microlevel of the body itself :the
contaminated <Ind contaminating carnal halo Ot the non
white bodyl.
There arc tWO main dimensions to this nonning; the epistc
mological and the moraL
The epistemological dimension is the corollary of tlle pre
emptive restriction of knowledge to European cognizers,
which implies thaI in certa,in spaces real knowledge (knowl
edge of science, universals) is not possible. Significant cultural
achievement, intellectual progress, is thus denied to those
spaees, which are deemed (failing European intervention) ro
be permanently locked into a cognitive state of superstition
and ignorance. Valentin Mudimbe refers to this as an "eptstc
mologieal ethnocentrism." Countervailing evidence may thcn
be treated in different ways. It may simply be destroyed, as
for eXilmple the invading Spanish conquistadors burned Aztee
manuscripts. It may be explained away as resulting from the
intervention of oursiders, for example from a previously un
known contact with whites: "Since Africans eould produce
nothing of value; the rechniquc of Yorubn statuary must have
come from Egyptians; Benin an must bea Portuguese creation}
the architeetural achievement of Zimbabwe was due to Arab
tecbnici<ms; and Hallsa and Buganda srarecraft were inven
tions of whire invaders.'" IThink of that favorite of carnies,
advenmre novels, Bmovics-thelost white tribe whose legaey
is discovered in some faraway, otherwise benighted place on
the earth, and which is responsible for whatever eulture the
hapless nonwhite natives may possess.) Sometimes even. an
extraterrestrial origin may bcsought, as the desert drawings in
South America have been attributed roalicn visitors. Similarly,
independently of the eventual outcome of the controversy
recently stimulated by the claim of Martin Bernal's BlacF.
OE7AllS
Athena that ancient Egypt waS a significant culrural influenee
on ancient Creece, and that it waS ro a large extent a black
civilizatlOo, one can surely inter that at jeast some or the
resistance to the idea in establishment white sehoiarship
comes from the apriorisrle presumption that no such achieve
ment eou1:l really hove come from black land ultimately " sub
Saharan"l Africa, [The phrase "sub-Saharan Africa" is itself,
in fa Ct, agcograpllic marker morivated bythe Radal Contract 1
Finally, the cultural achievements of others may simply be
approptiated by Europe without acknowledgmer:t, in effeet
denying the reaiity that "/the Wcst' has always 'bcen a multi
cultural creation."?
This norming is, of course, also lmnifested i.ll the vocabulary
of "discovery" and "explotation" still ln use until recently,
hasically implying that if no white person has beeu there be
fore, then cognition cannot really have taken place. In Heart
of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's Marlow pores OVOl' the globe and
notes that "there were many blank spaces on the earch. olD
And this blankness Signifies nor merely that Europeans have
not artived but that these spaces have not ar,dved, a blankness
of the inhabitants themselves. Afriea is thus the IIDark Conti
nent" because of tbe paucity of (rememberedj European con
tact with it. Com:spondiugty, there are rituals of naming
which serve to seize the terrain of these "New" Worlds and
ineOtporate them into our world: New England, New Holland,
New France-in a word, tlNew E.u ropes," "cultura.l-spatiai ex
tenslonlsJ of E.urope."n They ilte domesticJted, transformed,
made familiar, made a part of our space, brought jnto the
world of Europeau (which is human! cognition, so they can be
knowable and known. Knowledge, science, and the ahility
to apprehend the world intellectually are thus restricted to
Europe, which elnerges as t.he global locus of rationalIty; il t
least fa! the European cognitive agent! who will b c the one to
4.
THE RACIAL wmACi
validate local knowledge claims. Tn order fot these spaces to
be known, European perception is required,
Momlly, vice ano virtue are spatialized, flrsr on the mac
rolevel of a moral cartography that accompanies the litemi
European mappjug of the world, so that entire regions, coun
tries, indeed continems, are invested with moral qualities.
Thus Mudimbe dC$crihes the "geography of monstro;Hty" of
early Euwp!;an cartography, which, in a framework still largeiy
theologieal, panitlOns the known world and points out Where
There B Dragons.") Non-Europe;1n space is thus demonized
in a way th'lt implies the need fot Europeanization if moral
redemption is to bc possible. The link hetween the cognitive
and the maritI. of course, connects the failure to perceive l1atu
fill law with moral flaw: the darkness of the Dark Contlncm
is not merely the absence of a European presence but a blind
ness- to ChriStian light, which nc.cesso.tily results in moral
blackness, supers-tition, devil worship. Appropriately, then,
one of the medieval cartographic troditions was the mappa
mundL the map of the ""orld organized not on a grid system,
but around thc Christian cross, with Jeruso.lem at the eenterP
SimIlarlY, European settlers in America described the area
beyond the mountains as "Indian country,'1 "the D;1rk and
Bloody Ground . _ _ a howling wilderncss inhabhed by 'savages
and wild be.1$ts, ,tt or sometimes even " Sodom and Gomormh. IJ
And the society they saw themselves foundjng WitS, rone
spondingiy, sometimes refcrtoo to uS "New Canaan."!
The non-European state of nature is thus actual, a wild and
racialized plnce that was originally chamcterizerl ;1S cursed
with a theological blight as well, all unholy hmo. The European
state of nature, by cont-rast, is eirher hypothetical or, H actual,
generally a tamet aiiair, a kind of garden gone to seed, which
may need some clipping but is really already partlaUy domesti
cated .and just requires a few moilifieations to be appropriately
46
O:TMlS
ttansformed'-;1 testimony to the superior rnorul eharaeteris
tics of this space and its inhabitants. (Hobbes's paradigmati
cally ferocious state of nature may appeat to be an exception,
but as we will see later, ir is really only literal for non
europeans, so that it actually confirms rather than challenges
the ruk]
Because o( th.is moralrzation of spacel the journey upriver
or in general the journey into the interior in imperial
literature-the ttip away from the outposts of civilization into
native territoty--acquires deep symbolic significance, for it
is the expedition into hath the geographic llnd the' petsonal
heart of darkness, the evil Without which correlates with the
evil witbin. Thus in Apocalypse Now, Funeis Ford Coppokt's
1979 rewriting of Conrad in the eonte.xt of Vietnam, Willatd's
[Nillrtin Shcenj jOUrllCY upnVer to find Kurtz {Marlon Branda),
whose stages are sartorially marked tiu:ough the gradual strip
ping away of the [eivilizedJ uniform of the US. army to the
final mud-caked, machete-carrying e indistinguishable
from the ('.-ambodian vUlagers eeremonially killing the buffalo,
is both a normtivc descent mto moral corruption and a eogni
tive ascent to the realization that the war eould have been
won only by abandoning the restraints of Euro-American civi
lization las demonstrated in My L:ti presumably) and embrae
ing the " sl'lVageryn of the North Vietnamese aImy.15
The battle against this savagery is in ;1 sense permanent <IS
long as the s avages continue to crist, contaminating (and being
contaminated by) the n(>nEurope:lnized space around them.
So it is not merely that space is normatively eharaeterizedon
the mnero1evel before eonquest and colonial settlement but
,
dmt even afterward, nn tbe local l evcl, there are: divisions,
the European city and the Native Quartet, Whitetown and
Niggertov."11/Darkto:wn, suburb and inner dty. David Theo
Goldberg comments, "Powcr in the polis, and this is especially
41
 THE MC!Al CONTPAC
true of racialized power, reflecrs und refines the spatial rela
tions of irs inh<1b[fun tS,"l Part ot the purpose of the eolor barl
the color linetapartheidliim crow is to maintain these spuees
in ril",i; ploce, to have the cheekcrboard of virtue and vice,
light and dark space, OillS and tlmirs, cle;trly dem,neated so
that the human geography prescribed by the fuiciHl Contract
c.1n be preserved, For here the moral topography is different and
the dvilizlnglflission as yet Incompiete, Of this partitioning of
space and person, Frantz Fanon writes: "'The eoloniul wOId
is a world cnt in two, . . " The settlers' town is u town of white
people, of foreigners, , . , iThe native town I is a town of niggers
I culture and industry in sueh a way a s to render it morally
" and dirty Arabs. . , . This world divided into compartments,
I
this world CUt in two is inhabited by two different species/Ill
In raCT, rhe imilnacy of the connection between place <lnd
jSllb:pcrson means that perhaps i t never .Yill he completc, thnt
those associated with the jungle will tale the jungle with them
even when they (lre brought to more civilized regions. jThe
jungie is, so to speak, always waiting to reassert .itself: every
evoluc stands in danger of devolution.! One might argue that
in the United Stares the growing pOstwar popularity of the
locltdon of " urban jungle" reflects a subtextual fand not very
sub) reterence to the inCle(lsing nonwhiteness of the residents
or the inner cities, and the correspondiug pattern of "wltite
flight" to suburban vanillu sanctuary: our spaee/home spaee!
civilized space. In Amelica, South Aillca, and elsewhere, the
white space is patrolled for dark intruders, whose very pres
ence, independently of whut they may or may nor do, is a
blot on the reassuring civilized whiteness of the home space.
COllsider the curfew laws in segreguted neighborhoods eatlier
in US, hist-'Ot'Y land nrgunbly the continuing informal police
practices now), the notices that used to be posted outside
"sundown" towns_UNiggcr, don't let the sun set on you
DTA'lS
here!" The Racial Contract demareatcs spacej reservlngprjvi
leged spaces for its fust-cl<1sS eitizens.
The other dimension of moral appraIsal and nmming, which
is of course the one th..t becomes more central with seculariza
tiOn, IS not traditional Christian vicc and virtue but the emer
gent capitalist/Protestant ethic of settlement and industry.
Franke Wiltner argueS that the ideology of "progress and mod
ernization" has served for five hundred yeilfS as the dominant
justificution of Western displacement and killing of the
"Fourth World" of indigenous pCQples.' Here, spac <is nation
aUy eharacterized with respect to a EUlopean standard 'of agri
open for seizure, expropriation, settlement, development
in a word, peopling. In the white settler states, space will
sometimes be represented as literaUy empty and unoccupied,
, VOid, wasteland, "virgin" territory. There Is just no one there,
Or even If it is conceded that humanoid entities are p:resent,
it is denied that any real appropriation, any human shaping
of the wnrld, is tt1king place. So there is still no onc there:
the land is tena DUl1iUS, vacuum domicilium, again "'virgin."
,
"'rhus in the beginning/ locke tells us, I( all the World was
America. " 19 The central and mutually complementary myths,
as FrHncis iennings points out, are the twin ideas of "virgin
lands <lnd savage peoples.mIl In both cases, then, this will be
unpoopled land, inhabited at most by "varmints," "critters,"
"humt1n beasts," who are an obstacle to development, rather
than capable of development themselves/ and whose extermi
nation Drat least clearing awo.y is t1 prerequiSite tor civilization.
A numbers game is played, involving the systematic underw
eounting of the ahoriginal population, often hy a factor of ten
or morc, since by definition " large populations are Impossihle
in savage societies. Ull (And when they arc no longer large, one
will nol want to admit how large they Once were. I Riehard
49

Drinnon desenbes how many European settlers in the United
Stares thought of themselves as "inland Crusoesfl in an "un
peopled" wilderness, eharacterized by Theodore Roosevelt as
"[he red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world huM
"ll
SWl!y. Similarly, "A. t the time of fhst settlement in the Aus
tralian colonies aU lands were deemed to be waSte l<lnds <lnd
the property of the Crown. "lS In South Aftica, the trekbO$rS
went on exterminatory hunting expeditions and subsequently
"bragged about theit bag of Bushmen <lS fishermen boast abOUt
their eateh.'nI So the basie sequence ran something like this:
there arc no people there in tlle fust plaeeJ in the second place,
they're not improving the land, and in the thixdplace-oops!
they're already ail dead auyway (and, honestly, thCl'e really
weren't that ruany to begin with!, SO there arc no people tllere,
as we said in the first plaee.
Since the Racial Contract links spaee with race and race
with personhood, the white raced space of the polity is in
a sense the geographical loeus of the poliry propel', Where
indigenous peoples were permitted to survive, they were de
nied full or Ilny membership in the political community, thus
becoming foreigners in tbeir own eountry, Drjnnon deserihes
this remarkable urull Melvi liean politielll confidence trick:
liThe country was tull o(reeent nrrivnls from theEast,mysteri
ous impostors pretending to be natives and denying renl rwtives
their hurrutnity."15 Similarly, an Austtal ian historian eould
write in 1961: "Before the Gold Rush there were, after all,
few foreigners of any one race in Austraiia-except ror the
Aborigines, if we m'IY, sheepishly I hopei call them foreigners
after a manner of speaklng. >lUi (Where did you guys eome from,
anyway? You/re not from around here, ate you!) This nced
spaee will also mark the geographic boundary oJ the stare's
full obligations. On the ioeat leve1 of spatialization, nonning
then mauifests itself in the presumption thar certain spaces
50
CHAtS
ie..!;., those of the inner cityjareintrinsicaliydoomed to welfare
dependency, high street: crime, ullderduss status/ because of
the charlleteristies of its inhabitantst so that the larger eoo
nomie system has no role in Cleating these problems. Thus
one of the interesting consequences of the Racial Contract is
that the politicol space of the pollty is not coextensive with
its geogUlphica1 space;, In entering these {datkl spaces, one
is entering a region normatively discontinuous with white
political space, where the rules are different i n ways ranging
\
from dHferential funding (school re.<:ources, garbage collection.
infrastluetur...t rep...ir) to the absence of police' protection.
Finally, there is the microspacc of the body itself (wmcll in
a sense is thc foun dation of all the other levelsJ, the fact,
to be deall with in greater detail 1atef, that ,the persons and
subpersons, the citizens nud noncitizens, who inhabit these
politcs do so embodied in envelopes of skin, flesh, h...ir, The
nonwhite body ennies a halo of blackness around it which
may actually make some whites physically uncomfortable. lA
black American architect of the nineteenth century trained
himself to read arehitectural blueprints upside-down because
he knew white cl:ients would be made uncomfortable by having
him on the same side of the desk as themselves.) Part of this
feeling js sexual.: the bJack body in particular is seen a$ pata.
digmatically a body, 11 Lewis Gordon sU&gcstS that the black
"presence is a form of absence. , . . Every black person becomes
limb of an enormous black body: 'rUE: BLACK BODY."ih Whites
-may get to be "talking heads/' but even when bLacks' heads
',;uctalking. onelS always Uncomfortably aware of the bodies to
. >:;hi'h iliese heads areattnched, {So blacks ate at best "talking
.... ::::s.nl Early rock and roU was viewed by some white conser
'
, as 0. communist plot because it brought the rhythms
the mack hody into the white bodHy space; it began the
. u=.y subversion of that sp,aee. These are, literally, jungle
51
:tlE M:)IAl ::;ONTRi>.CT
rhythms, telegraphed from the $ptlee of saVager}', threatening
the civllized space of the white poliry and rhe carnul integriry
of its inhabitants. So when in the r950S wllite artists did cover
versions of "tace records," songs on the jim-crowed rhythm
and hlues charts, they were silnHlzcd, cleaned up, rhe rhythltls
rearranged; rhey were made recognizably "white.'"
More generally, there is also the basic social requirement
of disringuishingon the level ofcvcrydilY interaction tun inter
action raking place not an some abstract plane but ..ithin this
raeilllized space) personi>erson from person-subpcrson soclal
intercourse Thus in the United States, from the epoch of
slavery and 11m crow to the modern period of formili liberty
but continuing racism, the physicill interilctions between
whites ;:::md blacks ate C'.lretully regulated by a shiiting tilc1lll.
etiquetre that is ultimately determined by the current fotm
of the Racial Contraet. In her study of how white women's
lives are shaped b y race, Ruth Frankenberg describes thc re
sulting "racial social geography," the personal "boundary
mainrenance" rhat reqllired that one "always maintained .)
sepratcncss," a selfeonscious "boundary demarcation or
physical spaee.u Conceptions 01 one's white self mapa micro
geography of the acceprable roures through raeial SPace 01
one's Own personal space. These travcrsals of spaee arc im
printed with dominarion: prescribed postures of deference and
submission for the bhlck Orher, the body languilge of ll!)nupplt
mess Ina "reckless eyeballing"}; traffic-codes of ptiority ("my
space can walk thtough yours and you must step aside"); un
writren rules for derermining when to acknowledge thc non
white presence and when nor, dictaring spaccs of intimacy
and distance, zones ot comfort and diseomfort :/ltfiUS far and
no farther"!; and finally, of course, antimiscegenation laws and
lynching to proscribe <lnd punish rhe ultimate violation, ,he
penetration 01 bJack ioro white space.:IO If, as I earlier argued,
52
DETAILS
there is a sense in which the rcal polity is the virtual white
polity, then, without pushing the metaphor tOO far, one could
say that the nonwhite body is a moving bubble of wilderness
tn whitepolitical space, a nodeofdiseontinultywhich is neces
sarily in permanent tension with it.
The RacIal Conlnet norlnS land races) the Individual. J3stab!!stdng
personhood ami subpersanliand.
In the disincarnate poHltcal theory of the orthodox social
comract, the body vanishes! beeomes theoretically unimport.
ant, just as the physical spaee inhabited by that body is osten
sibly theoretically unimportant. But this disappeilring act is
jU$t <IS much an illusion in the former as in the latter case.
The reality is that One can pretend the body doe,s not matter
only because a particular body jthe white mate body) is being
presupposed i\S the somatic norm, In a political dialogue be
tween the owners of such bodies, the details of their flesh do
not matrer since they are judged to be equally rational, equally
capilble of perceiving natural law or theix own self-interest.
But as feminist theorists have pointed out, the body is only
irrelevant when it's the {whitel maJe body. Even for Kant,
who defines "persons" simply as rational beings, without any
apparent restrictions of gender or race, the female body demar
cates one as insufficiently rational to be politically anything
more than a llpassive" citizen,;;l Similarly, the Racial Conrract
isexpUeitly predicated on ll.l,ohtics of the bodywhienis related
to the body politie through re:strlctions on which bodies are
"pontic." There are bodies impolitic whose owners are judged
incapable of forming or fully entering imo ;] body politic.
The distant intellectual antecedent here, of course, is Aris
totle, who, in The Politics talks about "natural slaves," who
53

THE RA:;Il CCNTR4(i7
reduced it to .a homily, deprived i t of the shattering political
.force it once had. But what needs to be emphasized )5 that it
is only white persons land really only white males) who have
!:>een able to take this for granted, for wbom it ean be an
unexciting truism. As Lucius Outlaw underlines, European
liberalism restricts "egalitarianism to equality among equals, "
and blacks and others are omo!ogieally excluded by race from
the promise of "the liberal project of modernity. "JI The terms
of the Raeial Comract mean that nonwhite s1.1bpersonhood is
ellShrined simoltaneously TNith white personhood.
So in order to understand the workings of the polities struc
tured by the Radar Contract, I believe, we need to understand
subpersonhood also. Subpersons are humanoid entities who,
because of racial phenotYpe/genealogy/eulture, are not fully
human and therefore bave <1 different and inferior schedule of
(' tights and liberties applying to them, In other words, it is
possible to get away with doing things ro subpersons that one
,J
eouid not do to person.s, because they do not have the same
rights as persons. Insofar as racism is addressed at all within
mainstream moral. and political philosophy, it is usually
treated in a footnote as a regrettable deviation from the ideal.
But treadng it this Way makes it seem contingent, accidental,
reSidual, removes it from our understandmg. Raee is made to
seem marginal when in fact race has been central. The notion
of subpersonhood, by contrast, makes the Racial Contract
explicit, showing that to characterize things in terms of "de.
viations " :is i n .1 sense misleading. Rather, what is involved is
compliance with a nor m whosc existence it is now embar.
rassing to admit. $0 instead of l)fetending [hat thc social eon.
tract outlines the ideal that people tried to Iive up to but which
thc)' occasionally (tlS with aU ideals) fell short of, we should
suy fI'aukly that for whites the Racial Conuaet represented
the ideal, and what is involved is nOt devi:ttion from the : ffc.
56
OETM.S
tiveJ norm hut adherence to the actual norm. (Thus, I pointed
Ollt earlier "exccption.uism " was the rUle.) The "Racial Con
tract" as a theory puts race where it bdongs-at eemer stage
and demonstrates how the polity was in fact a racial one, It
white-supremacist state, for which differential white racial
entitlement and nonwhite Tileial subordination were deftrtin&
thus inevitably molding white moml psychology and moral
lbeorizlng_
, the degra.
This is most dearly the case, of course, for blacks
,been 'poimed
darion of racial slavery meaning, as has often
y oLan.cient
out, that for the first time land unlike the slaver
Greece and Rome or the medieval Mediterranean)
slavery ac
t in general, per
quired a color. But for the colonial projec
ct raceS. Jt
sonhood would be raced, hence the concept of "subje
s and non
The erucial conceptual divide :is between white
onee this central cut
whites, persons and subpersons, thongh
le, vari
has becn made, other internal distinctions an possib
"barbarians, " as ear
eties of subpcrsonhood ("savagest! versus
of the .Racial
lier noted) corresponding to dUferent variants
nialj. Thus ltipling's native
Contract !c:x:propriation/slave!colo
chi1dlt
could have more than one iaee-"half devil and hall
kinds might
so that while (ior the c)""Propriation contraetl some
cas, Australial
simply have to be extel'minated ias in the Ameri
eon tract) .a
and South Atriea), for others las in the colonial
Asia} might lead
paternalist gUidance las in coionial Africa and
But in all
them (as "mnorsJJ! ilt least partway to civilization.
dealing with entities
cases, the bottom line was that one was
omy and seli
not on the same moral tier, incapable of auton
raey,"
rule. "Negroes, Indians, and [KRffirs! cannot bear dcmoe
the Phantom,
concluded John Adams,l-P. :Think of Tarzan and
She and Sheena, white kings and qeen s ruling tbe black jun.
ut iLl
gle, laying down the law to the lesser breeds witho
n of the categorization
Moreover, the dynamic interrelatio
51
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
meant, as Hegelians would be quick to recognize, th.;tt the
c,Hegories reeiprocally de(ennined eaeh otber. Being a person,
being whitc, meam-dcfinitionally-not bejng a subperson,
llOt having the qualities thnt dragged one down to tile next
ontological level, In the ido::a l Kanctan world of he raeeless
soc);ll contract, persons can exist in ::ht;; nbstraet; jn the non.
ideal world of the naturalized Racial Contract, persons iHC
necessarily related to subpcxsons. For these are Identities as
"contrapuntal ensembles," requiring their opposites, with the
"secondariness" of subpersons b as Said phra.ses it, "'pala
dorically, essentia l to the primariness of the European. "J9
Where slavery was practiced, as in tbe United States and tlle
Americas, so that a sustsined reiation betwcen races obtained,
whiteness and blackness evolved in a forced intimacy of l.oath.
ing in which they determined each other by negation and
self-reeognition in part through tbe eyes of the ot!U',I. In his
pIizewinning book on the evolution of the idea of freedom,
Orlando Patterson argues that freedom has been generated
from the experience of slavery, that the slave establishes the
norm for JlUmans.D Part of the preSCnt-d:lY problrn in trying
to assimilate black Americans into the body politic is. the deep
encoding i n thc natioual psyche of the notion that, as Toni
Morrison points Out, Americanness dcnnitionally means
\\'hiteness; European immigrants who came to America ;in the
late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries proved their assimi
lation by entering the club of whiteness, affirming their en
dorsement of the Racial ContraeLl The longtime joke in the
black community is that the fhst word the German or Scandi
n,lVian or Italiau learns on Ellis Island fresh off the boat is
"nigger." Black American, At:dean AmerIcan, is oxymorouie,
wIliIe White American, Euro-American, l$ pleonastic, White
ness is defined in part in respect to an oppositional darkness.
so that white self-conceptions of identity, pCtsouhood, aud
DETAILS
selfrespect ure then intimately tied up with me' repudiation
of the blaek Other. No matter how poor one _was, one was
still able to affirm the whiteness that distinguished one from
the subpersons on tite other side of the color Bne.
Then:: is also 3 cognitive dimension that :is likcwiseenritmu
ous with thc Aristotelian traditiou. Historically the.paradigm
indIcator of snbpersonhaod has been deficient Iationality, the
inability to exercise in full the characteristic classically
thought of as distinguishing us {lOrn animals. FoI the social
contraet, a rough equality in men's eognitive powe.s or.at least
a nccessary groundflooI capability of detecting the-imrnanent
'
moral structuring of the universe luatural law), or what is
rntiunaUy reqnired far social cooperation, is eIucial to the
argument. For the Racial Contract, correspondingly, a basic
inequality is asserted in the C.;tpacity ofdifferent human groups
[0 know tbe world and to detect natural law. Suhpersons arc
deemed cognitivdy interior, lacking in the essential rational-
.
ity that would make them fully human.
In the early !theologieal)vcrsions of theRaeial Contract, this
difference was spelled out in terms of heathen unwillingness to
recognize God's word. One early sevcnrccn th-century minister
characterized NativeAmerieans as "having littleo-f Humanitic
but shape, ignotant of Civilitie, of ArtS, of Religion, more
brmish than the beasts they hum. more wild and unmanly
Ithani that unmanned wild CounIrey, which they range father
than inliabite; capuvated also to Satans tyranny."4! In lateI,
secular verSIons. it is a meed incapaeity rorrationality, abstr-act
thought, cultural development, eiviliza.tion in general lgener
atlng those clark cognitive spaces on Europe's mapping of the
world), In philosophy one could trace this eommon thtead
through Locke's speculatioIls on the incapacities of primitive
minds, Davld Hume's denial that any other race but whites
had created worthwhile civilizations, Kant's thoughts On the
59
 QUAilS
r.,[ fACIAL ccrfrAAc

ations involve a shift

epistemic agent, etc.j, iFurthcr complic
rarionaliry differentials between blacks and whites, Voltaire's m to a morc at tenuated
itom stmighrforw\ltd biological racis
polygene de conclusion that blacks were a dIstinct ;tnd less betshipjn the epistemic
IIculturnl" raelsm, where partial mcm
able species, lohn Stuan Mill's judgment that those races "in cxtc nr to whlcb nonwhites
community is granted based all the
their nonage" were fi t only for tldespotism. " The assumption
mte Western culture.)
showthemsclvcs capablc ofmastcringw
of nonwhite intellectual inferiority was widespread, even if involves a specific
Finall.y, th e norming of the individual also
not always tr icked out in the pseudoscientific appatatus that ing. Judgments oimoraI
norming of the body, an aesthetic norm
DarWinism would later make possible. Once this theoretical
wstlnet from judgments of
worth are obviously coneeptually
advance h<Id been made, of COU!se, there was a tremendous: ieal tendency to con
aes.thetie worth, but there is a psycholog
outpourjng of atrempts to put the norming on a quantinable ...entions oi, children's
late the t....o, as illustrated by the con
basis-a revitalized craniome t ry, claims about brain SJze and
their cast."of h<1r'ldsome
jand somc adults'l f;liry tates, with
brain corrugations, measurings of facia! angles, pronOUliee ins. Harmannu's Hoe
heroes, Ueamifut heroines, and ugly villa
mcnts about dolichocephalic and brachycephalic heads. rcca
" somatic norm image,"
tilik argues that aU societies have a
pltuJationism, and finaliy, of course, iQ theory- the i :ature deviation from which triggers alarm
s.H And George Mossc
p ut ativ ely correlated withjntelligcnce varyil1& but thedesitcd
nt involved " the establish
paints out that the Enlightenme
outCome of confirming nonwhite intellectual inferiority aI, fashioned.after classical
ment of a stereotype of human beau ty
ways achieved,',l worth. . . Racism was
models as the measure of all human
_

The impl ication s 01 th is denial of equal intellectual and

a visual ideology based upon stereOtyp
B
es, . . . eauty and ugH.
cogniZing <1bility ate vatious, Since, as ment ioned, it precludes
human cl assification as
ness hecame as much principles of
cultural achievement, itlnvites the intervention of thosc who
material factors of measurement,
climate" and the environ
are capable of cuJtme, Sinee i t precludes tne m oral develop es the white body the so
men t."H The Ril cial Contract mak
ment ecessary for b eing a responsible mora! and poli ti cal
t theories one finds not only
matic notm, so that in early mcis
a gen r, it predu des full membership in the polity. Since i r b eau tiful and fair faces
moral hut aesthetic judgmenrs, with
reclude$ veridical perception 01 th e world, it even precludes e nonwhites were close
pitted against ugly and dark raccs. Som
In som e cases COUrt testimony : slaves in the United States
e that they were sometimes
enough to Caucasians in appearane
were not allowed to give evidenee against their n:asters, nor
exotic way [Native Ameri
seen as bcautifui, attractive in an
could Australian Aboligmes te stify against the white settlers, e Asians), But t hose motc
cans on occasion; Tahitians; &om

In .ge etal, over a period of centuries, tne governmg epistemic
atotype-paradjgmaticaHy
distant from the Caucas.oid som
pnncl:ple could be stated as the requiremcnt that-at least Oil
n Aborjgines)-were stig
hlacks (Africans and also Anstraii.a
controversial issues-nonwhite cognition has to he verified deviant, Winthrop Jor
matizcd as acstllcticaHy repulsive and
by white cognition to be accepted as valid, And ir is pcrmitte(1
fascination with whie.h
dnn has documcnted thc repel lcd
to overrid e whire cognition only in extreme and unusupj cir
Englishmen discussed the appe
arance of the Afri.cans thcy
cum Stances Ilorge numbers of consisten t nonwhite wimesses, ditions, and Americans. such
encountered in early trading expe
some kmd of disorder 1n the cognizing cppacitles of the white

51
60

as Thomas Jefferson expressed their antipathy to Negroid fea
tures: (Benjamin Franklin, interestingly, opposed the slave
trade on grounds that were a, least partially aesthetic, as a
kind of bellutifieation program for America. Voicing his con
cen thac impona;:ion of Slaves had "blaeken'd half America,"
he tlsked: " Why increase the Sons of Afnca, hy Planting rhem
in Ameriea, Whete wc have so fair an Opportunity, by exciud
ing ;tIl BlacKs and Tawneys, of inereasing the lovely White
and Red?"l'f
To the extent tbat these norms are accepted, blacks will be
the race most alkntlted from thcir own ood ies -a fate particu
laxly painful for blaek women, \'fho, like aU women, will (hy
lhe terms, here, of the Sexual COlUmet) be valued ehiefly by
their physical appearance, whieh will generally be deemed to
fall shon of the Caucasoid or light-skinned ideaL4 Moreover,
apart from their obvious consequences for intra- and interra
cial seXUtll relationships, these norms wil] affeet opportuniti.es
and employment prospects also, for studies have confirmed
that a "pleasing" physical appearanee gives one an edge in job
competition. It is no aecident that bla[;ks of mixed race are
those who are differentially represented in employment in the
"
"white" world. They wiH, beeause 01 their background. often
(end to he better educated also, but an addi:ional fa etor is that
whites are less physically uncomfortable with them. " If we
have to hire any of them," it may be thought, "at least this
one laoks a bit like us,"
The Ratial Coniract underwrites the modern social conlract and Is
conlinually being rewrltten_
Rildieal femi.nists argue that tbe oppression of women :is tbe
oldest oppression. Racial oppression is much more recenr.
62
DETAILS
Whereas relations between the sexes necessarily go back to
the origin of the species, an intimate and central reiatlonship
between EurOpe a.<; .a colleetive entity and non"Europe, "white"
and "nonwhire" raees, is a phenomenon of the modem epoch.
There is ongoing sch olarly controversy over tht! existence and
extent of racism in anttquity Ii/racism" ilS a complex ofidcas,
that is, as against a dt!veloped politicoeeonomic system), with
some writC!s, such as Frank Snowden, finding a period "before
color prejudice," in which blacks are obviously seen. as equals,
and others claiming that Greek and Roman bigotry against
blacks was there from the beginning:9 Burohviously, wtever
the disagreement on thiS point, it would have to be agreed
eh:tt the ideology of modem wcism is far more theoretically
developed than ancient or medieval preludices and is linked
iw])atcver one's vieW, idealist or materialist, of C<'Iusal priority)
to a system of European domination.
Nevertheless, this divergence does imply that different ac
counts of the Racial Contract are possible_ The account I favor
conceives the Metal Contract :as creating not merely racial
exploitation, but race itself as a group identity. In a contempo
Tlll'y vocabulary, the Racjal Contract "constructs" raee, (For
, . other accounts, for eXtlmple, more essentialist ones, meial
self-identmcation would precede the drnwing up of the Racial
Contraet.) "White" people do not preexist but are brought
into existcnee as "whit es " by the Raci ..ll Contract-hence the
peculiar transformation of the human population that accom
panies this contract. The whltc race is invented, and one
becomes I'white 0y law, 11M!
In this framework, then, the golden. age of contract theory
{1050 to 18001 overlapped with the growth of a European capi
talism whose development was stimulated by the voyages of
explor.'llcion thatinereasingly gave theconrraetaracial subtcxt.
The evolution of the modem version of the conrract, charac-
63
------ ---' ------ -
THE ItAClAl COf1TRt\CT
terized by a n antipatdarchalist Enlightenment liberalism,
with its proclamations of the equnl rights, autOnomy, and
freedom of .. II meo, thus rook place simultaneousl)' with the
massacre, expropriation, and subjection to hercdito.ty slavery
of men a t least apparenrly hUman. This contradiction needs
to be reconciled; it is reconciled through the Racial Contract,
which essentially denies their personhood and restricts the
terms of the social COntract to whites. " To invade ilnd dispos
sess the people of an unoffcnding civilized country would
violate morality and trnnsgress the principles of international
law/, writes Jennings, "but savages were exceptional. Being
uncivilized by definition, they were ourside rhe sanctiOns of
both morality and lav.'."Sl Thc Racial Comract is thus the
truth of the social contraet_
There is some direct evidence that it is in the writings of
the clilssic contract theorists themselves. That is, it is 110t
merely a matter Ot hypothetical intellectu ul reconstruction
on my :pan, arguing from silence :hat "men" mllst really
have meant "white men!' Already Hugo Grotit:st whose early
sevc:nteenu)century work on natural law provi.ded the crucial
thcoT<!tlcal background for later eontraetarians, gives, as Rob
ert Williams has pointed Out, the ominous judgment th;.t for
"harbarians," "wild beasts rather than men, one may rightly
say . . . that the most just war is against savage beasts, the
nexr against men who are like beasts. ,, ;l But let us lust foells
on the fou .most important contract theorists: Hobbes, Leeke,
.
Rousseau, and Kant . i1
Consider, {O begin with, Hobbes's notoriously bes.tial state
of nature, .. state ot war where life is "nasty, brutish, and
shorL" Ot'\.a superRcial rCi:lding, it might seem that it 1S nonr:1-
cial, equaliy applicable to everybody, but notc wh<lt he says
when considering the objectiOn that there WilS never stIch 11
time, nor condition of warre as this." He replies, "1 believe it
6.
was never generally so, over nU the world: bUl there are mony
places, where they live so 001.'01,11 hi" example being "the savage
people in rntmy places of America. "S< So a nonwhite people,
indeed the very nonwhite people upon whose land his. fellow
uropcnns were then encroaching, 1..'1: his only real-life example
of people jn 3 srate of nature. lAnd in fact, it has been pointed
out thar the phr$lsing and terminology of Hobbes's character
iZlltion may well have beeo derived directly from the writings
ofcontemportl!ies abont settlement in the Americas. The "ex
plorer" Walter Raleigh described a civil war as Ua state of War,
which is- (he meer state of Natute of Men out of communitYI
wbere all have an equal right to all things.t' And two other
authors of the time characterized the inhabltants of the Ameri
eas as "people [who] lived like wild bcosts, without religion,
nor govcrnment, nor town, nor houses, without cultivating
the land, not clothing their bodieslt ond "people hving yet as
tbe first men, without lettcts/ without lawes,without Kings,
, Without common wealrhes, without arts . , . not civil by
nature. " I'';
In rhe next paragraph! Hobbes gOes on to argue that "though
there had never been any time, wherein par ticular men were
in a condition of Warre one against anomer," there is "in all
timesll a st;J:e of "conrinuall jealousies" between kings and
persons of sovereign authority. He presumably emphasizes
this contention in order for the reader to imagine what would
happen in the absence of a "common Power to teare."'" But
the text is confuslng.How could It simultaneously be the case
that ,jthere had never been" any such literal SC3te-ofnotul'c
war, when in the previous paragraphhe had just said that some
were living like that oow! Aki a result of tbis ambiguity, Hobbes
has been charaeterized as a hreral conrraetarian hy SOme com
mentators and as a hypothetical eomractarian by others. But
1 think this minor mystery ean be clc1.lIed up once we recognize
.5
"':HE P.ACIAL Co", TRACT
that there 1S a tacit racial logic in the text: the literal11tatc of
nature is reserved for nomvhl.tes; fOI whites the state of nature
is hypothetical. The conflict between whites is the conflict
between those with sovereigns, that is, those who are already
land have always been) in soejety, From this confliee, one can
extrapolate 1gesturing at the raei.]l abyss, SO to speak! to what
might happen in the absence of a ruling sovereign. aut really
we know that whites are tOO rational to allow thls to happen
to rhem. So the most notorious state of nature in the eon
traetarian literatUre-the bestial war of all against ,all-is
rcaBy a nonwhite figure, a raeial object lesson for the more
ratioO:ll whites, whose superior grasp of natural law !here in
its prudential rather dum ..Jtruistic versioni will enable them
to take the neeessary Steps to avoid it and not to behave as
Us,wages. " Indians,5 Though they share tIle state of nature for a time
Hobbes has standard!y been seen as an awkwardly transi
tional writer, caught between feudal absolutism and the rise
of parliamentari:mism, who uses the eontract now elassieaUy
assoeiated with the emergenee of liberalism to defend absolut
ism. Bur it might be argued that he is tranSitional in another
way, in that in mid-seventeenth eemmy l:kltain the imperial
projeet was not yet so fully developed that the intellectual
apparatus 01 :meial subordination had been completely elabo
rated. Hobbes remainsenolJgh of a taeial egalitarian that, while
singling out Natiqe Americans for his realHfe example, he
suggests that without a sovereign even Europeans could de
scend to theirstarc, and that the absolutiSt government appro
priate for nonwhites eould also be appropriate for whites}'
The uproar that greeted his work can be seen as attributable
at least in part to this moral/political suggestion. The sprelld
of colonialism would eonsolidate an inteHectual world 1n
whieh this bestial State of nature would. be reserved for non
white Savages, to be despotically governed, while civil Europe-
rn:TAI
ans would enjoy the benefits of liberal p<U'liamentar'ianism .
The Racial Contract began to fiwtrite the social contract.
Oue can see this transition more clearly by the time ofLoeke,
whose state 01 nature is normatively regulated by traditional
laltruistic, nonprudential! natural law, It is a moralized state
6f nature in which private property and money exist, indeed
a stntc 01 nature that is virtually ciyil. Whites' ean thus be
literally in this state of nature :for a brief period, anyway!
without its calling into question their innate qualities. Locke
famously argues that God gave the world lIto. th u se of the
Indusawus and Rational," whieh qualitles were Indicated by
laboL So while industrious and rational Englishmen were toil.
ing away at home, in America, by contrast, one found I'wild
woods and uncultivated wastlcJ . . . left to Nature" b y the idle
with nonwhites, then, their residence is necessarily hriefer,
since whites, hy appropriating and adding viilue to this natural
world, exhibit their superior rationality, So the mode of appro
pria tion of Native Americans is no real mode of appropriation
at all, yielding propeny tighrs that c:m b e re<ldily overridden
jif they exist at aU!, and thereby rendering their territories
normntively open for sejzurc once those who have long since
left the state of nature (Europeans) encoun ter them. Locke's
thesis was in fact to be the central pillar or the expropriation
contract-"""the principal philosophical delineation of the nor
mative arguments supporting white civilization's conquest of
America," writes Williamss9-and not merely in the: United
States but later in lhe other white settler states in Africa and
the PllcLfic. Aboriginal economies did not improve the land
and thns could he regarded as nonexistent.
The practiee, and arguably also the theory, of Locke played
a role in the slavery eontraet also. In the Second Treatise.
Locke defends slavery resuhing from <l jusr war, for examJ;!le,
67
THf RACiAl CONTRACT
a defensive war <lgalIlst aggression. This would hardly be an
accurate characterization of European I'l11ding parties seeking
African slaves, and in any case, in the same chapter Locke
explicitly opposes hereditary slavery and the enslavement of
wives and children.60 Yet Locke had .investments in the sl.avc
trading Royal .A.frica Company and earHer assisted in writing
the slave constitution of Carouna. So one could lltgue that
the Raci<lJ Conrrac: manifests itself here in an astonishing
.inconsistency, which could be resolved bythesupposidon that
Locke saw blacks as not fully human and thus as subjeet to a
different set of nonnative tules< Or perhaps the same Lockcan
moral logic that covered Native Americans can be extcndL"<i
to blacks also. They wcren't appropriating their home comi.
nent of Africa; they're not radonal; thcy Can be enslavcd.IiJ
Rousseau's writings might Seem to bc something of an cx
ception. After all, it is with his work that the nOtion of the
"nohlc savage" is associated Jthough the phrase is not actually
his own). And in the Discourse On Inequality's reconstruetion
of the origins of society, everybody is envisaged as having been
in the state of nature land thus to have bcen "savage") at one
time or another. But a careful reading of the text reveals, OllCC
again, crucial racial distinctions. The only natural savages
citcd arc nonwhite savages, examples of European savages be
ing restricted to reports of feral children raised by wOlves lind
bears, child-rearing practices (we are told! comparable to thosc
of Hottemots and Caribs.6': IEuropeans arc so intrinsically civi.
lized that it takes upbringing by animals to turn them into
savages.) For Europe, savagery is in the dim distant past, since
metaliurgy and agriculture are the .inventions leading to civili
zation, and it turns Out that "one of the best reasons why
Europe, if not the earliest to be civilized, lias been at ICllSt
more continuously and better civilized than other partS oi the
v,.-orld, is perhaps that it is ott once 'the richest in jron and the
DETAILS
most fenile in wht." Sut Rousseau was writing more than
two hundred years after theEuropcan eneounterwith the great
Aztec and Inca empires; wasn't there at least a little metallurgy
and otg.riculture in evidence there? Apparently not: "Both met
allurgy and agriculture were unknown to the savages of
America, who have always therefore remained savages.'''',s So
even what might initially seem to be a more open environmen
tal determinism, whieh would open the door to racial egalitari
anIsm rathet than racial hicra:rchy, degenerates into .massive
historical amnesia and factual misrepreSCQt.ution;. driven by
the presuppositions of the Racial Contract.
Moreover, to make the obvious point, even if some of Rous
seau's nonwhite savages are unoble," physically and psycho
logically healthier than the Europeans of the degraded .und
corrupt society produeed by the reallife bogus contract, they
are still saV.:lges. So thcy are primitive beings who are not
actu.ully part ofcivil society, barely raised above animals, with
Out language. Leaving the state of nature, as Rousseau argues
.in The Social Contract, his later account of an ideal polity, is
necessary for us to beeome fully human moral agents, beings
capable of justiec.(.i. So the praise for nonwhite savages is a
limited paternalistic praise, tantamount to admiration for
healthy animals, in no way to be taken to imply their equality,
let alone superiority, to the eivilized Europeans of the i:deal
polity. The underlying racial dichotomization and hierarchy
of civilized and savage remains quhe clear ,
Finally, Kant's version of the social contract is in a sense
the best illustrot:ion of the grip of the Racial Contract on
Europeans, since by this time the aetual contract and the his
torl! dimension of contractarlanism had apparently van
ished altogethct. So here if anywhere, one would think-in
this world of abstract personsl demarcated as such only by
their rationality-race would have become irrelevant. But as
69

Enlmanuel Eze has recently demonstrated i n great detail, this
orthodox picture is radically misleading, and the nature of
Kantian "persons" and the Kamian " contract" musr really be
rethought,M For it lutnS Out rhnt Kant, widely regarded as the
most important moral theorist of the modern period, in a sense
the father of modern mOta] theory, and-through the work
of Tohn Rawls and lurgen Habermas-incre8sing]y cenua! to
modern political philosophy as weil, is also the father of the
modern conceptoi mee,(,(' His 1775 essay "The Dificrent Races
of Manklnd" !"Von den Vcrscbieden(.:n Rassen der Menschen")
is a classic pro-hereditarhm, untienvinmmenral isl statement
of "the immutability and permanence of race." For him, enm
menls George \1.osse, "racial make-up beeomes an unchanging
substance and the foundation of all physieal appeanmce and
human development, including intelligence, 'Ii; The famous
theorist of personhood is also the theorist of subpersonhood,
though rhis distinetion is, in what the suspicious might almoSt
think a conspiracy to conceal embarrassing truths, far less
weB knO>'t'n,
As Ezc points out, Kanr taught anthropology and physical
geography for tony years, and his philosophical work really
has to be read in conjunction with uleselectures to understand
how rncialized his views on mora.l charaetet were, His notori
Ous commcnt in Observations on tl1e Feeling of the Beautiful
and Sublime is well known to, and often cired by, black intel
lectuals "So fundamcntal is the difference between [the black
and whitel races of man . . . it appears to be as great in regard
to mental ell.pJ.eities as in color" so that "a clear proof that
what Ill. Negro] s.'lid was stupid" was rhat " tllis fellow was
quite: black from head to foo t . " &; The point of Eze's essay is
(ho.t dtis remark is by no means isolated or a casual throwaway
Hne that, though of course rcgrettable, has no bro",:ler implica
tions. Rather, it comes out of a deVeloped theory of race <md
70
OEiAILS
corresponding intdleetual ability and limitation. Itonly seems
casual, unembcddcd in a lurgcr theory/ because white<1eademic
philosophy as an institution has had no interest in reseMching,
pursuing the implications of, and making known to the world
this dimension of Kant's work.
In facr, Kant demarcates and theorizes a colorcoded racial
hierarchy of Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Native Ameri
cans, differentiated by their degree of innate talent. Ezc ex
plains: "'Talent' is that which, by 'nature.' guarantees for the
'white,' in Kam's racial rational and mom] order,- the highest
position above all creatures, fo1l9Wed by the' yel1ow/ the
'black,' and then the 'red: Skin eolor for Kant is evidence of
superior, inferior, or no 'gift' of 'talent,' or the capa city to
rcalize reaSOn 11M rational-morAl perfcctibility through
education. . . It cannot, therefore, b e Jlrsued that skin color
for Kam was merely a physical characteristic. It is, rnther,
evidence of an unchanging and unchangeable Q'lorJlI quality.'"
Europeans, to no onc's surprise I presume, bave all the neces-
5JX)' talcl1ls to be morally self-educating; there is some hope
ior As:.ans, though they laek the abilhy to develop abstract
concepts; rhe innately idle Africans can at leasr be educated
as servants and slaves through the instruction of a split.
bamboo eime IKant gives some useful advice on how to beat
Negroes effieientlY); and thc wretehed Native Americans are
just hopeless, and cannot be educated at all. So, in complete
opposition to the image of his work that has come down to
us and is. standardly taught in introduetory ethics courses, full
pcrsonhood for Kant is aetuaUy dependent upon race. In Eze's
suliimnry, "The Wack person, for example, can accordingly be
denied full humanity sinee full and 'true' humAAity accrueS
only to the whlte European:'t
The recent furor about Paul de ManJO and, decades earlier,
Martin Heidcsger, for their complicity with the Nazis, thus
71
TI'iE it'\C;A1. CDNTit4cr
needs to be put jmo perspcctive. These arc cssemiaHy bit
players, mmor le,1guers. One needs to distinguish theory from
actual practice. of course, and I'm not $<lying that Kant would
have endorsed genocide. But the embarrassing fact for Ul!';
wlliu: West (which doubtless explains its concealment) is dun
their most important moral theorist of the past elm,:.e lmndred
yeGIs is also the kmndational theorISt in the modem period
of the division between Herrenvolk and Untermenschen, pel
sons and subpusons, upon wltich Nazi theory would later
draw Modern moral theory and modern racial rht!ory ha\'c
.
the same father,
The Racial Contract, therefore, undC1Wntes [hc soeia! COn
tract, is a visible or hidden operator that testricts and modiBcs
tbe scope of lts prescriptions, But since there is hmh syn
chronic and diu chronic variation, there :tre many different
verslons or local instantiations of the Rndal Contract, and
they evolve over time, so that the effectivc foree of the soeial
COntract itself changes, and the kind of cognitive dissonance
between the two alters. lThis change [us implications for the
moral psycholog)< o( the white signatories and their ch<1rHct(:J'
istjc patterns of insight and blindness.) The soc!;,ll COntract is
(in its orjgin<11 historical version! a spedfie discrete event (hat
founds society, even if {through, e.g., Lockean theories oI tacit
const;m) subsequent genetodons continue to ratify it on an
ongoing basis. By contrast the Racial COlUtaCt is conti'nually
being mvnitten to create different forms of alc racial polity.
A global periodization, 01 tirneline ovetview of the cvohltion
of rhe Racial C'.ontract, would highlight first of <111 rhc crucial
division between the time before and the timeafterthemstitu
tionulization of global white supremacy. \Thus Janet Ahu
Lughod's book ahout the thirteenthccflttl!yffourtecnth-cen.
tury medleval world system is titled Before European Hege
mony_in The time after would then he further subdivided imo
!)F"AILS
the period of formal, juri.dical white supremacy jthc epoch of
the EUropean eonquest, Airlc:tn slavery, and EuropeAn colo
nialism, overt white racial seliidentification, and the largely
undisputed hegemony of racist theories) and thepresertt period
of de faeto white supremacy, when whites' dominance is, for
the most part, no longer eonstitutionally And )uridH!ally en
shrined hut rather a matter of social, political culturaL and
economic privilege hased on the legacy of the conquest.
In the first period, the period of de jute white'supremaey,
the Raeial Contmct was explicit, the chactcristie
instantiations-che expropriation eontraet, the slave contract,
the coloninl contract-making it clear that whites were the
privileged race and thc egalitarian social contract applied only
to them. (Cognitively, then, this period had the great virtue of
social transparency: white supremaey was openly proclaimed.
One didn't have to look for a .mbtext, heeausc it was there in
the text itsclf.) In th e seeond period, on the O'ther hand, the
Raeial Contract hos written itself out offorma1 existence. Thc
scope of the terms in the social contract has been lormally
extended to apply to everyone, so that "persons" is no longer
coextensive with "whites." What characterizes this pcri.od
{whieh is, of coursc, the presenrl ls tension helween continuing
de facto white privilege and this formal extension o( rights.
The Radal Contract continues to manifest itselI, 01 course,
in unofficial loeal agreements of various ktnds Irestrietive
covenancs, employment discrimination contracts, political de
cisions about resource allocation, etc.), But even apart from
these a crucial manifestation is simply the failure to ask
;
cerw n q uesr ions, taking (or granted a$ ll status quo and base
line the e)(jstIns color-coded configurations oJwealth, povertYI
property,and opportunities, the pretence that formal, juridical
equality is suffieient to remedy inequities created on II founda
tion of several hundred years of racial privIlege, and that ehal
73
ThE Rl<OAL CONT;jftcr
lenging that foundarion is a transgression of the !:erms of the
soci<1l contract. :Though actuallY-in a sense-it is, insofar as
the Racial Contract is the -real meaning of rhe social contract.)
Globally, the Racial Contract eftccts a final pllladoxic.al
norming and racing of space, a writing out at the pollty of
certain spaces as conccptuaUy and hiscorieally irrelevant to
European and Em:o-world development , so that these laced
spaces arc categorized as disjoined from rh.c path of elviUzation
(i.e., the European project). Fredric Jameson writes: "Colonial
ism means that a significant structural segmem of the ecO
nomic system as a whole Is now located elsewhere, beyond
the metropolis, ourside of the daily life and existential experi
ence of the home country. . . . Sueh spatial disjunction bas as
its immediate eomcquenee the inability co grasp the way the
system functions as a whole."n By ,he social contract 's deci
sion to remain in the space of the European nntion-state, the
connection between the development of this spaee's industry,
culture, civilization, and the material and eultural contrihu
tions of Aho-Asia and the Americas is denied, so it seems
as if this spa()e and its denizens arc peculiady uKiona! and
industriol.ls, differentially endowed with qualities that have
enabled them to domirulte the world. One then speaks of the
"European miracle" in a way that conceives thls once margirul.l
region as ui generjs, conceptually severing it from the web
01 spatial connections that made its. development possible.
Tbis space actually comes tohave the character it do()s because
of the pumping e:;:ploirarive C<1usality estahlished between i t
and those oLlier eoncepruillly invisible spaces. But by re
maining within the boundaries of the Europcan SP';ICC of the
abstract contract, i.t is valotized as unique, inimitahle, autono
.
mOUS. Ot her parts of the world then disappear from the whitc
contr3Ctman histOry, subsumed under the general caregory
of risible nonEuropean space, the " Third World." where for
74
DETA lS
reasons of local folly and geographical blight the inspiring
model of the selfsuffieicnt white social contraet eannot be
followed.
Nationally, wirhin these racial poUties, the Racial Contuct
manifestS itself i n white resistance to anything more than the
formal extension of the tenus of the abstract.social contract
(and often to that also). Whereas before it was denied that
nonwhires were equal persons, it is now pretended that non
whites am equal abStract persons who ean be fully included in
the politymetely by extending the seope of the n1Qral operator,
without <lny fundamental change in the arrangements that
bave rt;sulted from the previous system of explicit de jure
racial privilege. Sometimes the new forms taken hy the Racial
Comract arc transparently exploitative, lor example, the "jim
crow" contract, whose claim of "separate but equall1 was pat
endy ludicrous. But others-the joh discrimination contraetl
the restrictive eov enilntare harder to prove. Employment
agencies use subterfuges of various kinds: "In 1990, for exam
ple, two fonner employces of one of New York City's largest
employment agencies divulged that discrimination WAS rou
tinely practiced against black applicantS, though concealed
behind a number of code words. Clients who did not want to
hue blacks woutd indicate rheir preferenee for nppl.leants who
were 'All American! For its part the agency would signal that
all applicant was black by teversing the initials 01 the place
ment eounseloLU1l Similarly, a study of how "Ametican apatt
heidi! ismallltaincd points out tllat whetcas in the past realtors
would have simply refused to sell to blacks, now blacks Ilare
met by a realtor with a smiling faee who, through a series of
ruses, lies, and deeeptions, makes it hard for them to learn
about, inspect, rent, or purchase homes in white neighboro
llooos . . . . Because the discrimimtion is latent, howcv ir is
usuaUy unobservable, even to the person experiencing it. One
75

[leVer knows for sure."''; Nonwhites then find tht raee is,
paradoxieally, both everywhere and rlOwhcrc, s.trucruriug their
Bves but not formaHy recognized in poHtical}moral theory.
But In a raciaHy structtllcd polity, the only people who can
nnd it psychologically possibie to deny the centrality of nlee
are those who aTe racially privileged, for whom (ll ce is invisible
precisely beellus.e the world :is structured around them, whitt:
ness as the ground against which the figures of other races-
those who, unlike us, are racedappcar. The fish does. nOt
sec the water, and whites do not sce thc racial nature of a
white polity because it 15 natural to them, the clement in
which they move, As Toni Morrison points out, thc:re are
contexts in which claiming raeelessness is itself a racial aet.
Contemporary debates between nonwhites and ..",hitcs abou t
the centrality OT periphera!ity of race cn thus be sc..:n as
attempts rcspectively to point om, and deny, the existence of
the Racial Contract that underpins the social contract, The
frustrating problem nonwhics ha'\'c always had, and continue
to have, with m.ain.strealU political theory is not with abstrac
tion i[5e11 :after aU, tbe "Ra-cial Contract" is itself 1111 nbsuac
CianI hut with all idenli:dng abstraction that abstrac ts away
from the erucial relllities of the racial polity,7!. The shift to
the hypothetical, ideal c:olltaCt eneour.1gcs and facilitates this
ab5traction, since the eminendy nonidea1. features oj thc Leal
world are not part of the apparatus. There is then, i n a sense,
no eoneeptuill poim-or.emry to start talking about thc hmda
memal way in whieh (as aU nonwhitcs knO\\'! race structures
one's life and affeets one's life chances.
The hlaek law professor Patrieia Williams eomplains about
an ostensible neutrality that is Ct::ally "racism in drag/' il sys
,
tem of ( racism as statUS quo" whiehis " deep, angry, eradicated
from view" but continues to make people "avoid the phantom
as they did the substance," "deferlringl to the unsccn sbape
76
CHALS
of things, '-;7 The black philosophy proies.sor Bill Lawson com
ments on the deficiencies of the conceptual apparatus of tradi
tional liberalism, which has no room for the peculiar post
Emancipation status or blneks, simultaneously citizens nnd
noneitizens,1S The black philosopher of law Anitl1 Allen re
lllarks on the Hony of standard Amer ican philosophy of law
texts, which describe a univers e in whic h "all humans are
paradigm rightsholclers" and sec no need to point out that
the aetual u.s. record is somewhat different,19 The retreat
of mainstream normative moral and political thftory into an
"ideal" theory that ignores race merely reseripts thc Racial
('.antraet as thc invisible wrhing between the lines. So John
'
Rawls, an Amcriean working in the late twentieth century,
writes a bnok on jnst'i,cc widely credited with reviving postwar
polir:'eal philosophy in whieh not a single reference to Anlerl,.
can slavery a.nd its legacy can be found, and Robert Noziek
erc.ates a theory of iustice in holdings predicated on legitimate
acquisition and tram,ter without more than two or three sen
tcneesncknowicdglus:the utter divergeneeot u.s. history from
this ideal. >(
Thc silence of mainstream moral and politica.l philosophy
on issues of race is a sign of the continuing, power of the
Colttract over its s.ignamries, an illusory color blindness that
actually entrenches white privilege. A genuine wlfl.seendenee
of its terms would require, as a preliminary, [hc acknowledg
ment of its past .md present existenee and the soeial, political,
eeonomic, p!'lyehologieal, and mornl implications it has had
both for its eomr:lctors and its vctlms, By treating tbe present
as II somehow neutrnl baseline, with its givet\ configuration
of wealth, property, social standing, and psychological willing
ness to sacrifice, the idealized social eonttact renders pcrma
- nent the legacy of the Racial Contract. The ever-deepening
abyss between the First World and the Thud World, where
77

mHlions-latgcly nonwhite-die of starvation each year and
many more hundreds 0; mtllions-al.so largely nonwhite
live in wretched pover ty IS seen as unfortunate (calling, cer
. "bestial appearancc"-tnat it would now seem incredible to
tainly, for the occasional charitab:e contribmionJ bm ume
lared to the history of transcontinental and intraeonrinental
racial exploitation.
Finally, the Racial Contract evolves nm merely by altering
the relalions berween whites and nonwhites but by shHti!1g
the criteria for who (;ounts as white and nonwhite, ;So it is
not merely that relations berween rhe respective populations
change but that rhe population bonndades themseh,es change
also.! Thus-at least in my preferred account of the Racial
Contract !rtgain, orher accounts are possiblej-raee IS debm
logizcd. making explidt its political. founda:lon. In (I sense,
rIle Racial Contract construct!; its sjgnatorje, as much as the)'
construct:iL Th e overan trend is toward a limited cxpnnsioll
of thc privileged human population through the "whitening"
of the previously excluded group in question, though there
may be local reversnls.
The azi project ean thell be scen in part as rbe Hnempt to
turn the dock back by rewriting a more exclusivist version
of the Racia1 Contract than was globally acceptable at the time.
lOne writer suggests ironically thar this was "rhe attempt of
the Germans to make themselves masters of the master
Tace_"Il A."'.Id this backtracking le,1ds ro a prohlem. My catego
rization iwhhe/nonwhire, person/subperson) has the virtues
of elegance and simplici t y and seemsro me w map the essential
features of the tacinl polity accurately, to Carve the soelul
reality at its onwlogicnl joints. But sinee, as a pair of eonrrndie
cories, this. categorization is ioindy exhaustive of the possibili
ties, it raises the question of where to locate what could be
celled "borderline" Europeans, white people with a question
mark-the Irish. Slavs, Mcd ltemmeans, and above all, of
78
OET.G!LS
course, Jews, In the colonial wars with Ireland, the English
routinely used derogatory imagery-tlsavugcs," "cannibals!'
apply to whites,#lThc waye of mldnineteenth*ccntury Irlsh
immigration into the United States stimulated one wit to
observe thut "it would be a good rhing if every Irishman were
to kHl a nigger and then be hung for it/' and, c.aricatures in
the newspapers often represented the Irish as simian, European
racism ilgainsr nonwhites has been my focus, but there were
also intra-European varieries at tfrllcisml!-Teutonism, A..,glo
Saxonism, Nordicism-whieh ale roday of largely antiquarian
interest lmt which were sufficiently influential in the 1920S
that U,S, immigration law favored "Nordics" over "Mediterra
nenn5." jThere lS some recognition of this distinction in popular
culture, Clleers fans will rememb er that the l'ItalianlJ waitress
Cnr!'l IRhea Perlman], curly haired and swarthy, sometimes
ea.lIs the biond, "alab;lster-skinned" WASP Diane [Shelley
Long) "Whitey," and in the 1992 movie Zebrahead, two black
teenagers discuss the question of wherher Italians are really
white.: Fmally, 1ews, of COUIse, have been the victims of Chris
tian tUIOpe's antiSemitic diserilninntion and pogroms since
medieval times, this rccord of persecution rcachjng its horrific
climax under the Third Reich ,
How, then, should these Europeans be categorized, given
tnc whi te/n onwhite dichotomization? One solution would be
to rejeet it for a three- or four-way division. But I am reluctant
to do so, since t think the dyadic partition reatly does capture
the essential snucmrc of the global racial polity. My solution
therefore is to retain but "fuzzify" the categories, introducing
interna.l distinctions within them 1 have already pointed OUt
,
rhat some nonwhites V'barbarians" as against "savagesU)
ranked higher than others; forexampJc, the Chinese .and fAsian)
Indians would have been placed above Afticans and Australian
79
iMc RACIAL COUTPACT
Aborigines. So it wonld seem that onc could also rank whitest
and in raCt Winthrop Jordan notes that "if Europeans were
white, some were whucr than orhers. "iU AJl whites are equal,
then, but some are whiter, and so mme equal, than Others,
and all nonwhites are unequilL but some arc blackcr, and so
more unequal, than others. The fundamen:al coneeptual CUt,
the primary division, then remains that between whites and
nonwhites, and the fuzzy statuso lnfcnor whites is,lceommo
dined by the category of "off-white" rather than nonwhite.
Comm.enthlg on the failure of the "valiant efto! tS of thc E.nglish
to turn their ethnocentric feelings of supcriority over the
'bJack' Irish into racism," Richard Drinnon concludes that
"the Celts remained at most 'wllice niggers' in their eyes."';
And whh the exeeption of Nnzi Germany, to he discussed
later, this seems to me " judgmenr that could be generalized
fo!' aU these cases of borderline EuropellnS-that they were
not subpersons in the [utI technical sense and would all have
been ranked olltologically above genuine nonwhites. The c,lse
with which they have now been assimila red into postwar Eu
rope and aeeepted as full whites in the united States is somc
evidence for rhe correctness of this way of drawing the
distinction,
Nt:vertheless, these problem caseS afC useful in
illustratingagniJtst essentialists-thc social rather tban bio
logical basis of the Rae;al Contract. Phenotypical whiteness
and European origin were not .uways sufficient for !ullWhitc
ness, acceptance into rhe inner sanctum of the racial elub,
and the rules had to be rewritten to permit inclusion. lOne
reeent book, for example, bc.ars the tide How rhe Irish Became
WIli!e.l! On the other hand, thcre are groups "c1eary" nOt
white who have conjunctUTilUy come ro be seen as such. The
Japanese were classified as Nhonoraty whites" for the purpose
of the Axis alliance, the restrictive, local Racial Contract {as
so
DETA!LS
they were in South Africa under apartheidJ, while being classi.
fled as verminous nonwhites with respect to the Western AJ
lies, inhcritors of the global Racial Contraet.% A eentury ago,
at the time of the European domination of China and the Boxe!
rebellion, the Chinese were a degradetl race, signs were POSted
saying "No dogs or Chinese allowed/, and they faced heavy
imm.igration !es.t1ietions and diserjmination in the United
States. " Yellow Peril" depictions of Chinese in the American
popu:ar media in the early twentieth century included the
sinister Orientals of Sa.x Rohmer's Fu M,!nehu novels and the
Ming the Meleiles nemesis of Flash Gordon. But today in the
United States, Asians are seen as a " model minority," even
laecording to Andrew Haeker) "probationary whites," who
might make it if they hang in there long enough. "Is Yellow
Black or Whitc!" asks one Asian Ameriean historian; the an_
swer varies.SI The poim, then, is that the membership require
ments for Whiteness are rewritten over time; with shifting
criteria prescribed by rhe evolVing Racial Contract .
The Racial C{mtracl has to be enforced ItJrough violenca and
Ideological conditioning.
The .sociAl COntract is, by definition, claSSically volunturjs
tie, modeling the polity on a basis of individuillized consent.
What justifics the Iluthority of the state over us is that "we
the people" agreed to give it that authority. IOn the older,
"feudal" patriarchal model, by contrast-the moder of Sir Roh.
ert Filmer, Locke's tat:get in the Second Treatise-people were
. represented as being born into subordil1<ltion.ji!3 The legiti-
maey of the state detives from the freely given eonscnt of the
signatories to transfer or del.cgat:e their rights to itl and its role
in the mainstream moralized/constitutionalist version of the
B1
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
comract :Locke2.n/K'lI\ti,m) is, correspondingly, to protect
[hose rights 2.00 safeguard the weUare of lis citizens. The
liberal-democratic state is then an ethical state, whcthc: in
the minimalist, night-v,-a.tchman LoekMn version ofenfordng
noninterference with citizens' rights or in thc more expansive
rcdistl'ihutivistversionof actively promoting ci tizens' wel rate.
]n both cases the liheril! stute is neuual ln thc sense of not
pnvileging some eitizens ovet others. Correspondingly, the
laws thatare passed have as then rationale this Juridical rcgul<t
tion of the polity for generally acceptable moral cnds.
This idea.lized model of the hber;dwdemocratlc state has, of
course, been challenged from various politieai directions ovcr
the Pilst century or so; the recently revivcd Hegelian moral
critique ftom the perspcetlve ofa comp et'mg, allegedly superor
ideal, a comrmmiwrinll state seeking actively to promote a
common conceptJon of the good; the degradcd version of (his
in the fascist corporatist state; the anarchist challenge to all
stilteS as usurping bodies of legitimized violcncc; fmd what
hilS been the most influential radical entique up till recently,
the Marxist i1nfliysis of the state as an instru::ncnt of elass
power, so that the liberal-dcmoerutic state is supposediy un
masked as the bourgeois state, the state of the ruii.ng class.
My claim 1s that the model ot the Radal ContraCt shows
us mat we need .ll1other alternative, another way of theorizing
about and critiqning tile state: the racial, or white
supremacist, state, whose functton inter alia is to safeguard
the polity as a whitc or whlte..oominated poUty, enforcing the
terms of the Racial ContraCt by the approprJine means and,
when necessary, facilitating its rewriting from one form to
another.
The liberal-democratic state of classic contractadanism
abides by the terms of the social contract by using forcc only
to prOtect its citizens, who delegated dllS morahzcd force to
B2
DETAilS
it 50 that it couid guarantee the 5af<:ty not 10 be found in the
5tate of nature. /This was, aiter ali, part of the whole point of
leaving the state of nature in the first plaee.) By contrast, the
state established by the Racial Contract 1s by definition not
ncutral, since its purpo.'le is to bring ahout conformity to the
terms of thc Racial Contract among the subpcrson population,
which will obviously have no reason to accept these terms
voluntarily, since thccontraet is <ro exploitation contract. (An
alternative, perhaps even superior, formulation might be: i t
is neutral for its full citizens, who arc white, bu as a corollary,
it is nonllcutraI toward the nonwhites, whose intrfnsie sav
agery constantly tbreatens reversion to the statC of nature,
bubbles of wHderness within the polity, as I suggcsled.l
OJ nr:cessity, then, this state treats white.s and nonwhitcs,
persons and suhpcrsons, differently, though in later variants
of the Raeial Con tract it is neeessary to conceal this dillerenee.
In seeking flrst to establish and later to reproduce itself, the
racial state employs thc tWO traditional weapons of coercion:
physical vjolenee and ideological couditioning.
1\1 the carly phase of establishing global white supremacy,
overt physical violence was, of course, the dominant face of
this political project: the genocide of Native Americans in thc
conquest of the tWO continents and of Aborigines in Australia;
the punitive colonwl wars ::n Africa, Asia, and the PaciRe;
the incredible body counts of slaving expooitionsl the Middle
Passage, "seasoning," <rod slavery itseli; the statesupportcd
. seizure of lands and imposjtion of regimes of forced labor. In
th expropriation contmct, the subpernons arc either killed or
placed on reservations, so that extensive daily intercourse
with them is not necessary; they are not part of the white
polity proper. !n the slavery and colOnial contracts, on thc
'other nand, persons and subpersons necessarily mteraet regu
-la.rly, SQ that constant watchfulness for signs of subperson
83
HE Me!!.! CQ'JTRACT
resistance to me terms of the Raeial Contracr is required, If
rhe social contrncr is predicated on voluntarized compliance,
rhe Racia! ContraCt dearly requires compul!l.ion for rhe repro
duction of :he political system, In the slavery Contracr, in
particulaf, the terms of the contract requite of the slave llll
ongoing seU-oegadon of personhood, an aecepranee of ehnted
status, psychologically harder to achieve and SO potemiillly
more explosive than me varieties .of subpersonhood imposed
either by the expropriation contract {where one wiU ei,her be
dCtld ar sequestered in a SPIU!C tClr away itom white persons
or the colonial contr,let (where the Status oj " minor" leaves
some hope eha, onc may be permitted to ilchiev\! adulthood
some day!. Thus, in he C.lribbean and on the mainland of the
Amerieas, there Were sites where newly arrived Africans were
sometimes taken to be "seasoned" before being nanspotted
to the plantations, And this was basically the metl1physic;,ll
opera tion, carried out through the physical, of breaking them,
transforming them from pctsons into subpersons of the chattel
vaiety. Bnt sinee people could always fake acceprance of sub
personhood, it was, of course, necessary to keep an eternally
vigilant eye on them for possible signs of dissemhHn& in keep
ing with the sentiment that eternal vigilance is the price of
freedom,
The coercive afms of the stare, thenthe pollee, the perull
system, the army-need to be seen as in part the enforcers of
the Raeial Contract, working both to keep the peaee and pre.
vent crime among the white citizens, ond to maintain the
rllcia] ordet and detect and destroy challenges ro ir, so thnr
across the white settlcr. states nonwhites are incarcerated a t
differential rates and for longer rerms. To understand thc longl
bloody history of police brutality against blacks in the United
States, for example, one llas to recognize it not as exceSSeS
by individual racists but as an organie pan of this politiea.l
84
DETA1LS
enterprise. There is a well-known pereeption 10 the bJack
counmmit y that the police-partieulal1y in the jim crow days
of segregation and largely white police fon:es-were basically
an "army of oeeupation,"
Correspondingly, in aU these white and white ruled politics,
-
<1ttacking or kHling whires has always been morally and juridi.
caDy singled om as the crime of crimes, a horrWe break with
the natural otder/ not merely because of the greater vatue Ot
white (I.e" a person'sj lile but because of its larget symbolic
significance as a chnllenge to rhe raeial poli ty The death pcn
.
Hity is dlfferen:ially applied to nonwhites both in the seope
of crimes CO'... ered ii-c., racially differentiated penalties for the
same cr.imcsJ; aod in its actual carrying out. (In the history
of U.S. el1pital punishment, for example, over one thousand
people have been executed, but only vcry rarely has a white
been executed for killing a blaek.}W Individual acts of subper
SOIl violence against whites and, even moresctrous, slaverebcl
nons and (;olOnial uprisings are standardly punished in an
exemplary way pour encouroger les outres. with torture and
,
reta liatOry mass killings far exceeding the nllmber .of white
vietims. Sueh acts htlVe to be seen nm as arbitrary, not as
the product of individual sadism Ithough they encourage and
provide an outlet for it), but as. the appropriate moral and
political reslXiose-prescribcd by the Raeial Contract-to a
threat to Jl system predicared on nonwhite subpcrsonllood.
There is an outrage that is practieally metaphysical because
one's selfeonceptkm, one's white identity as a superior being
entitled to rule, is under attaek.
Thus in the North and South American reactions to Native
American resistance and slave uprisingsl in the European te
sponses to the Saint Domingue (Haitianl revolution, the Sepoy
uprising {"Indian Mutiny"I, the Jamaican MorantBay insurree
tion, the Boxer tebelbon in China, the struggle of the HereTO:;
85
THE RAClAt CONTRACT
In German Alriea, in the twentieth century eolonial and neo
colonial wars !Ethiopi<l, Madagascar, Vietnam, Alger!<l, Ma
laya, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Nnmibial/
in the white settlers' batrles to maintain a white Rhodesia
.and an apartheid South Africa, one repearedly sees the same
pattern of system<ltie m.aSS;H:;re, It is a pat:en rh,ll t eonfinns
that an ontological shudder has been sent through [he sysrem
of the whiTe polity, calling forth wh:<t could De called ,he
llie tcItor to make sure rhat the foundations of the mora)
\.....
and political universe s tay in place. Describing tbe "shod:: to
\"hite America" of rhc Sioux defeat of Custer's Seven:h OIV
aIry, one author writes: "It was rhe kjnd of hu miliming defeat
that simply could not be handed to a modern nation of 40
million people by a few scarecrow savages. "l V. C. Kiernan
commems on Haiti : " No savagery that has been recorded of
Africans anywhere could outdo some of the acts of the French
in their effons ro regain eontrol of the island." Of the In dian
Mutiny, he writes, "Al ter victOry there were savage reprisals.
For rhe firsr time on such <I scale, but not rhe last, the West
was trying ro quell the East by frightfulness . . . . Some of the
f<lcrs that havc eomc down to us almost stagger bciief, even
after the horrors of Europe's own twentieth-century history. "'#2
In generat, then, watehfulness for nonwhite resistance aod
corresponding readiness :o employ massively disproponiolliltc
reta!i<ltory violence ;He intrinsic to the fabrie of the raciOll
polity in ::J. way different from rhe response to the typical
climes of white citizens.
But offiei<ll state violence is not the only sa nct ion of the
Racial Conrract. In the Loekean state of nature, in the absence
of a consrituted iuridical and penal authority, natural lilW per
m its individuals rhemselves co punish wrongdoers. Those who
show by rheir actions that they lack or have "renounced" the
reason of natural law and are like "wild Savage Beasts, wirh
DETAILS
whom Men can have no SOCiety nor Secur i.ty; " mily licitiy
ne destroyed.t:l Bur if in the rOleiOll polity nonwhires may be
reg<ltded OIS inherently bestial and savage (quite independemly
01 what they happen to be doing a t any particular momentL
then by extension they CJin be conceptualized in parr as ",
carryin.g :.he s late of nature around with them, incarnati ng :
wildness ,md wilderness in their person. In effect, they ean be r
reg;1Tded even in eivilsociety as being potentially at the center !
of a mobile free-nre zone in whieh citizento-citizen/white
o n-whit e moral. and juridical constraints do not ohtain. Par
ticularly in frontier situations, wbere official White authority
is distant or unreliable, indiVidual whites may be regarded as
endowed with rhe aurhority to enforce the Racial Contraet
themselves. Thus in the Unitcd StilteS paradigmaticaUy ibut
also in the European settlement in Aus t rali", in the colonial
ourpost in the "bush" or "jungle" of Asia and Africa! there is
a long hiStOry of vigilantism and lynching 'at whieh white
officialdom baSically connived, inasmuch as hardly anybody
WilS ever punished, though rhe perpetrators were well known
Dnd on occasion photographs were even av;tilDble, (Some
lynchings Were ildvertised days in ildvanee, and hundreds or
thousands of people gilthered from su!tounding distriets.) In
l the Northern Territory of A ustralia, one government medical
officer wrote in 1901, "It was notorious that rhe blaekfcllows
were shot down like crows and that no notice was t"ken/'on
The other dimension of this coercion is ideological. If the
Raci.al Contract erco tes its signatories, those parry to the Con
t ract, by constructing them as "white pcrsons," it also tries
to make its victims, the objects of the Contract, into the
"nonwhite subpersons" it sp ecifics. This project requires labor
at botli ends, involVing the development of a depcrsonizing
conceptual apparatus through which whites must learn to see
nonwhires ood U]SO, etucially, through which nonwhites must
81
THE RAC!f,:' CONTRACT
lear:; to see themselves. For the nonwhites, then, this if; somc
thing like the intellectual equivalent of the physi cal process
of "seasotting/' "slave breaking.." the tlim being to produce >Ln
emity who aceepts subpersonhood . Fredcrick Dougl.1ss, in bis
ramous first autObiography, describes the need to "darken (the]
moral and mental vision, and, as tar as possible, to annih i l:tt e
the power of reason" of the slave: "He mUst he uble to detect
no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that
slavery is right; und he Ca n be brought to that only when he
ceases to be a man, "9t Originally denied education , bbeks were
later, in the postbcllum period, given an education appropriale
to poste!l;;,t'tel status-the den!tll of a pnst, of history, of
aeh ie vement-so that as far s possible they wouid llcccpt
theJr prescribed roles of servant :lnd menial laborer, comic
coons nd Snmbos, grateful Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas.
Thus in one of tbe most famous hooks from the black Ameri"
Call expcrienee, Carter Woodson indicts "the mis-edueatiOll
of the Negro." And as hne as the 1950S, James BaldWin could
declare tha.t the "separate but equal" system of segregiltion
"has worked brilliantly, " for "it has allowed white people,
\"/ith searedy any pangs of conscienee wh<.ltcvcr, to creme, in
every generation, only the Kcgro they wished to see. ,N"
ln the cnse of Native America ns, whose resistance was
largely over by the 1870S, 1I policy of cultw;;tl i.lSsimilation was
introduced under the slogan "Kill the Indian, bUt save the
man," aimed at the suppression and eradication of native reli
gious beliefs and ceremonies, such as the Sioux Sun Dance.A>
Similarly, a hundred yca.rs later, Daniel Cablxi, a BJtlzillan
Pared Indian, eomplains that " the missions kill us from
within. , . . They impose upon us ,;tnother teligion, belittling
the ynlues we hold. This decharll.cteriscs us to tbe poin t where
we lire <lsharned to be Indian s."'loo The Mohnwk scllOl.:tr Jerry
Gambill lisrs "Twenty-one Ways to 'SCAlp' on Indian," the rust
Ofi;.llS
being ":o..1ake hinl a nonperson, Human tights ale for pcople..
Con....inee Indians their nncestors were savages, that they were
pagan."hU Likewise, in the coloni.al enterptise, ehHdren in the
Caribbetln, Afriea, and Asia wew taught OUt of Britlsh or
French Or Dutch schoolbooks to see themselvcs us usphant
IDut, of course, never full) colored Europeans, saved from thc
barbarities of thdr OWn cultures by colonial intervention, duty
wetting "OUt ancestors, the Gaulsl" and growing up into adults
with "black skln, "White masks!'IOl Australian Aborigine stu
dents write: "Black is, wrond at white schools but righted
by expetience. . . . nIaek is, going to white school and earning
home again no wiser:'I!\1\ NgIlg'i wa Thiong'o deserlbes, from
his experience in his native Kenyu, the "cultural bomb" of
British imperialism, whieh prohihitcd learning in the ora l tra
dition of Gikuyu and trained him a nd his schoolfellows to see
themselves .tnd their country through the alien eyes of
H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan: "The effect of a cultural
bom b is to annihilate a people's belief in their IUlmes, in their
languages, in their environment, in their hcritage of struggle,
in their unity, in theireapacitics and ultimate ly in themselves.
It makes them see their past as OtIC wasteland of noo
achi evement and it makes them want to distanee themselves
hom that was teLand. 'Il Racism as an ideology needs to be
understood as aiming at the minds of nonwhites as well 3S
whites, inculc.tring sub juga.tion. If the social contr:l.ct Iequires
that all citizens and persons learn to tespeet themselves and
each other, the Racial Contraet preserlbes nonwhite self
loathing and racial deference tn white ci.tizens. The u ltimate I\
triumph of this education is that it eventually becomes possi. \'
ble to characterize the Racial Contract 3S " consensual " and
"voluntaristic" even fot nonwhites.
I
89
 NATURALIZED " MERITS

inally, I want to point .out the merits of this model

F as a "naturalized" accouht of the actual historical

record, one which has explanatory as well as norma
tive aspirations. Arguably, we are in a better position to bring
about the (supposedly) desired political ideals if we can identify
and e;xplain the obstacles to their realization. In tracking the
actual moral conciousness of most white agents, in depicting
the actual political realities nonwhites have always recog
nized, the theory of the "Racial Contract" shows its superior
ity to the ostensibly abstract and general, but actually "white,"
social contract.

The Racial "Gontract historically tracks the actual moral/political

consciousness of (most) white moral agents.

Moral theory, being a branch of value theory, traditionally

deals with the realm of the ideal, norms to which we must
try to live up as moral agents. And political philosophy is
nowadays conceived of as basically an application of ethics to
the social and political realm. So it is supposed to be dealing

91
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
with ideals also. But in the first two chapters of this book, I
have spent a great deal of time talking about the actual histori
'cal record and the actual norms and ideals that have prevailed
in recent global history. I have been giving what, in the current
jargon of philosophers, would be called a "naturalized" ,ac
count, rather than an idealized account. And that is why I said
from the beginning that I preferred the classic use of contract,
which is seeking to describe and explain
"
as well as to prescribe.
But if ethics and political philosophy are focused on norms
we want to endorse (ideal ideals, so to speak), what really
was the point of this exercise? W hat would be the point of
"naturalizing" ethics, which is explicitly the realm of the
ideal?
My suggestion is that by looking at the actual historically
dominant moral/political consciousness and the actual his
torically dominant moral/political ideals, we are better en
abled to prescribe for society than by starting from ahistorical
abstractions. In other words, the point is not to endorse this
deficient consciousness and these repugnant ideals but, by
recognizing their past and current influence and power and
identifying their sources, to correct for them. Realizing a better
future requires n?t merely admitting the ugly truth of the
past-and present-but understanding the ways.. in which
-
these realities were made invisible, acceptable to the white
population. We want to know-both to describe and to
explain-the Circumstances that actually blocked achieve
ment of the ideal raceless ideals and promoted instead the
naturalized nonideal racial ideals. We want to know what went
wrong in the past, is going wrong now, and is likely to continue
to go wrong in the future if we do not guard against it.
Now by its relative silence on the question of race, conven
tional moral theory would lead the unwary student with no
experience of the world-the visiting anthropologist from Ga-
92
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
lactic Central, say-to think that deviations from the ideal
have been contingent, random, theoretically opaque, or not
worth the trouble to theorize. Such a visitor might conclude
that all people have generally tried to live up to the norm but,
given invitable human frailty, have sometimes fallen short.
But this conclusion is, in fact, simply false. Racism and racially
structured discrimination have not been deviations from the
normj they have been the norm, not merely in the sense of
de facto statistical distribution patterns but, as 1 emphasized
at the start, in the sense of being formally codified, 'written
down and proclaimed as such. From this perspective, the Ra
cial Contract has underwritten the social contract, so that
duties, rights, and liberties have routinely been assigned on a
racially 'differentiated basis.. o understand the actual moral
practice of past and present, one needs not merely the standard
abstract discussions of, say, the conflicts in people's con
sciences between self-interest and empathy with others but
a frank appreciation of how the Racial Contract creates a
racialized moral psychology. W hites will then act in racist
ways while thinkJng of themselves as acting morally. In other
words, they will experience genuine cognitive difficulties in
recognizing certain behavior patterns as racist, so that quite
apart from questions of motivation and bad faith they will be
morally handicapped simply from the conceptual point of view
in seeing and doing the right thing. As I emphasized at the
start, the Racial Contract prescribes, as a condition for mem
bership in the polity, an epistemology of ignorance.
Feminist political philosophers have documented the strik
ing uniformity of opinion among the classic male theorists
on the subordination of women, so that as polar as their posi
tions may be on other political or theoretical questions, there
is common agreement on this. Plato the idealist and Aristotle
the materialist agree that women should be subordinate, as .
93
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
do Hobbes the absolutist and Rousseau the radical democrat.!
With the Racial Contract, as we have seen, there is a similar
pattern, among the contractarians Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau,
Kant, and their theoretical adversaries-the anticontractarian
Hume, who denies that any race other than the white one h'as
produced a civilization; the utilitarian Mill, who denies the
applicability of his antipaternalist "harm principle" to "bar
barians" and maintains that they need European colonial des
potism; the historicist G. W. F. Hegel, wlw denies that Africa
has any history and suggests that blacks were morally im
proved through being enslaved.2 So the Racial Contract is "or
thogonal" to the varying directions of their thought, the
common assumption they can all take for granted, no matter
what their theoretical divergences on other questions. There
is also the evidence of silence. W here is Grotius's magisterial
On Natural Law and the Wrongness of the Conquest of the
Indies, Locke's stirring Letter concerning the Treatment of
the Indians, Kant's moving On the Personhood of Negroes,
Mill's famous condemnatory Implications of Utilitarianism
for English Colonialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's
outraged political Economy of Slavery?3 Intellectuals write
about what interests them, what they find important, and
especially if the writer is prolific-silence constitutes good
prima facie evidence that the subject was not of particular
interest. By their failure to denounce the great crimes insepa
rable from the European conquest, or by the halfheartedness
of their condemnation, or by their actual endorsement of it
in some cases, most of the leading European ethical theorists
reveal their complicity in the Racial Contract.
W hat we need to do, then, is to identify and learn to under
stand the workings of a racialized ethic. How were people able
consistently to do the wrong thing while thinking that they
were doing the right thing? In part, it is a problem of cognition
94
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
and of white moral cognitive dysfunction. As such, it can
potentially be studied by the new research program of cognitive
science. For example, a useful recent survey article on "natu
ralizing" ethics by Alvin Goldman suggests three areas in
which cognitive science may have implications for moral the
ory: (a) the "cognitive materials" used in moral thinking, such
as the logic of concept application, and their possible determi
nation by the cultural environment of the agent; (b) judgments
about subjective welfare and how they may be affected by
comparing oneself with others; and (c) the role of empathy in
influencing moral feeling.4
Now it should be obvious that if racism is as central to the
polity as I have argued, then it will have a major shaping
effect on white cognizer:s .in all these areas. (a) Because of
the intellectual atmosphere produced by the Racial Contract,
whites will (in phase one) take for granted the appropriateness
of concepts legitimizing the racial order, privileging them as
the master race and relegating nonwhites to subpersonhood,
and later (in phase two) the appropriateness of concepts that
derace the polity, denying its actual racial structuring.s (b)
Because of the reciprocally dependent definitions of superior
whiteness and inferior nonwhiteness, whites may consciously
or unconsciously assess how they're doing by a scale that
depends in part on how nonwhites are doing, since the essence
of whiteness is entitlement to differential privilege vis-a.-vis
nonwhites as a whole.6 (c) Because the Racial Contract requires
the exploitation of nonwhites, it requires in whites the cultiva
tion of patterns of affect and empathy that are only weakly,
if at all, influenced by nonwhite suffering. In all three cases,
then, there are interesting structures of moral cognitive distor
tion that could be linked to race, and one p.opes that this new
research program will be exploring some of them (though the
95
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
past record of neglect does not give any great reason for
optimism).
,
This partitioned moral concern can usefully be thought of
as a kind of "Herrenvolk ethics," with the principles applicable
to the white subset (the humans) mutating suitably as they
cross the color line to the nonwhite subset (the less-than
humans). (Susan Opotow has done a detailed study of morali
ties of exclusion, in which certain "individuals or groups are
perceived as outside the boundary in which morql values,
rules, and considerations of fairness apply"; so this '\vould be
a racial version of such a morality')? One could then generate,
variously, a Herrenvolk Lockeanism, where whiteness itself
becomes property, nonwhites do not fully, or at all, own 'them-
' selves, and nonwhite labor does not appropriate nature;8 a
Herrenvolk Kantianism, where nonwhites count as subper
sons of considerably less than infinite value, required to give
racial deference rather than equal respect to white persons,
and white self-respect, correspondingly, is conceptually tied
to this nonwhite deference/ and a Herrenvolk utilitarianism,
where nonwhites count distributively for less than one and
are deemed to suffer less acutely than whites.1O The actual
details of the basic values of the particular normative theory
(property rights, personhood and respect, welfare) are not im
portant, since all theories can be appropriately adjusted inter
nally to bring about the desired outcome: what is crucial is
the theorist's adherence to the Racial Contract.
Being its primary victims, nonwhites have, of course, always
been aware of this peculiar schism running through the white
psyche. Many years ago, in his classic novel Invisible Man,
Ralph Ellison had his nameless black narrator point out that
whites must have a peculiar reciprocal "construction of [their]
inner eyes" which renders black Americans invisible, since
they "refuse to see me." The Racial Contract includes an
96
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
epistemological contract, an epistemology of ignorance. "Rec
ognition is a form of agreement," and by the terms of the
Racial Gontract, whites have agreed not . to recognize blacks
as equal, persons. Thus the white pedestrian who bumps into
the black narrator at the start is a representative figure, some
body "lost in a dream world." "But didn't he control that
dream world-which, alas, is only too real !-and didn't he
rule me out of it? .-t\nd if he had yelled for a policeman, wouldn't
I have been taken for the offending one? Yes, yes, yes! "11 Simi
larly, James Baldwin argues that white supremacy "forced
[white] Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they
approached the pathological," generating a tortured ignorance
so structured that one cannot .raise certain issues with whites
"because even if I should -speak, no one would-believe me,"
and paradoxically, "they wOHld "not believe me precisely be
cause they would know that what I said was true."12
Evasion and self-deception thus become the epistemic norm.
Describing America's "national web of self-deceptions" on
race, Richard Drinnon cites as an explanation Montesquieu's
wry observation about African enslav :ment: ''It is impossible
for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing
them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves
are not Christians." The founding ideology of the white settler
state required the conceptual erasure of those societies that
had been there before: "For [a writer of the time] to have
consistently regarded Indians as persons with a psychology of
their own would have upended his world. lt would have meant
recognizing that 'the state of nature' really had fullfledged
people in it and that both it and the cherished 'civil society'
had started out as lethal figments of the European imagina
tion."13 An Australian historian comments likewise on the
existence of "something like a cult of forgetfulness practised
on a national scale" with respect to Aborigines. 14 Lewis Gor-
97
 THE RACIAL CONTRACT
don, working in the existential phenomenological tradition,
draws on Sartrean notions to .argue that in a world structured
around race, bad faith necessarily becomes pervasive: "In bad
faith, I flee a displeasing truth for a pleasing falsehood. I must
convince myself that a falsehood is in fact true. . . . Under the
model of bad faith, the stubborn racist has made a choice not
to admit certain uncomfortable truths about his group and
chooses not to challenge certain comfortable falsehoods about
other people. . . . Since he has made this choice he w.ill
' resist
whatever threatens it. . . . The more the racist lays he game
of evasion, the more estranged he will make himself from his
'inferiors' and the more he will sink into the world that is
required to maintain this evasion."ls In the ideal polity one
seeks to know oneself and to know the world; here such knowl
edge may be dangerous.
Correspondingly, the Racial Contract also explains the ac
tual astonishing historical record of European atrocity against
nonwhites, which quantitatively and qualitatively, in numbers
and horrific detail, cumulatively dwarfs all other kinds of
ethnically/racially motivated massacres put together: la ley
enda negra-the black legend-of Spanish colonialism, de
famatory only in its invidious singling out of the Spanish, since
it would later be emulated by Spain's envious competitors, the
Dutch, French, and English, seeking to create legends of their
own; the killing through mass murder and disease of 9 5 percent
of the indigenous population of the Americas, with recent
revisionist scholarship, as mentioned, having dramatically in
creased the estimates of the preconquest population, so that
at roughly 100 million victims-this would easily rank as
the single greatest act of genocide in human history/6 the
infamous slogans, now somewhat embarrassing to a generation
living under a different phase of the Contract-"Kill the nits
and you'll have no lice!" as American cavalryman John Hous
98
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
advised when he shot a Sauk infant at the Wisconsin Bad Axe
massacre,17 and "The only good injun is a dead injun"; the
slow-motion Holocaust of African slavery, which is now esti
mated by some to have claimed thirty to sixty million lives
in Africa, the Middle Passage, and the "seasoning" process,
even before the degradation and destruction of slave life in
the Americas; 18 te casual acceptance as no crime, just the
necessary clearing of the territory of pestilential "varmints"
and "critters," of the random killing of stray Indians in
America or Aborigines n Australia or Bushmen in South Af
rica; the massively punitive European colonial retaliations
after native uprisings; the death toll from the direct and indi- .
rect consequences of the forced lahor of the colonial econo
mies, such as the millions '(priginal estimates as high as ten
million) who died in the Belgian Congo as a r.e sult of Leopold
II's quest for ;rubber, though trangely it is to Congolese rather
than European savagery that a "heart of darkness" is attrib
uted;19 the appropriation of the nonwhite body, not merely ,
metaphorically (as the black body can be said to have been
consumed on the slave plantations to produce European capi
tal), but literally, whether as utilitarian tool or as war trophy.
As utilitarian tools, Native Americans were occasionally
skinned and made into bridle reins (for example by U.S. Presi
dent Andrew Jackson),2 Tasmanians were killed and used as
'
dog meat,21 and in World War II Jewish hair was made into
cushions, and (not as well known) Japanese bones were made
by some Americans into letter openers. As war trophies, Indian
scalps; Vietnamese ears, and Japanese ears, gold teeth, and
skulls were all collected (Life magazine carried a photograph
of a Japanese skull being used as a hood ornament on a U.S.
military vehicle, and some soldiers sent skulls home as pre
sents for their girlfriend s).22 To these we can add the fact that
because of the penal reforms advocated by Cesare Beccaria
99
 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS

and others, torture was more or less eliminated in Europ

e by the camps and ghettos of Europe and the millions of members
the end of the eighteenth century, while it continued
to be of other "inferior" races (Romani, Slavs) killed there and by
routinely practiced in the colonies, and on the
slave the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front by the Nazi rewriting
plantations-whippings, castrations, dismeberments,
roast of the Racial Contract to make them too nonwh IteSj 28 the
ings over slow fires, being smeared with sugar, buried in the
up to pattern of unpunished rape, torture, and massacre
the neck, and then left for the insects to devour, being
filled twentieth -century colonial/neocolonial and in part racial wars
with gunpowder and then blown up, and so onj23 the fact
that of Algeria (during the course of which about one million Algeri
in America the medieval tradition of the auto-da-fe, the
public ans, or one-tenth 'of the country's population, perished) and
burning, survived well into the twentieth century, with
thou Vietnam, illustrated by the fact that Lieutenant William
sands of spectators sometimes gathering for the festive
I
occa- Calley was the only American convicted of war crimes in
sion of the southern barbecue, bringing children, 'p
icnic Vietnam and, for his rol in directing the mass murder of five
baskets, etc., and subsequently fighting over the remaih
s to hundred women, children, and old men (or, more cautiously
see who could get the toes or the knucklebones before
ad and qualifiedly, "Oriental human beings," as the deposition
journing to a celebratory dance in the eveningj24 the fact
that put it), was sentenced to likat hard labor but had his sentence
the rules of war at least theoretically regulating intra-Europea
n quickly commuted by presidential intervention to "house ar
combat were abandoned or suspended for non-European
s, so rest" at his Fort Benning bachelor apartment, where he re
that by papal edict the use of the crossbow was initially '
forbid mained for three years before "being freed on parole, then and
den against Christians but permitted against Islam, the
dum nOW doubtless a bit puzzle by the fuss, since, as he told the
dum (hollow-point) bullet was originally prohibited '
within military psychiatrists eXlj.mining him, "he did not fel as if
Europe but used in the colonial wars,25 the machine gun
was he were killing humans but rather that they were animals
brought to perfection in the late nineteenth century in
subju with whom one could not speak or reason.";l.9
gating Africans armed usually only with spears or a few
obso For these and many other horrors too numerous to list, the
lete firearms, so that in the glorious 1898 British victory over
the ideal Kantian (social contract) norm of the infinite value of
Sudanse at Omdurman, for example, eleven thousand
black all human life thus has to be rewritten to reflect the actual
warriors were killed at the cost of forty-eight British soldier
s, (Racial Contract) norm ofthe f r greater value of white life,
a long-distance massacre in which no Sudanese "got ,
closer and the corresponding crystallization of feelings of vastly dif
than three hundred yards from the British positions,"26
the ferential outrage over white and nonwhite death, white and
atomic bomb was used not once but twice against the civilia
n nonwhite suffering. If looking back (or sometimes just looking
population of a yellow people at a time when military necess
ity across), one wants to ask "But how could they ?" the answer
could only questionably be cited (causing Justice Radha
binod is that it is easy once a ce,rtain social ontology has been created.
Pal, in his dissenting opinion in the Tokyo War Crimes
Trials, Bewilderment and puzzlement show that one is taking for
to argue that Allied leaders should have been put on trial
with granted the morality of the literal social contract as a normj
the Japanese),27 We can mention the six million Jews killed
in once one begins from the Racial Contract, the mystery evapo-

1 00
1 01
 THE RACIAL CONTRACT
rates. The Racial Contract thus makes White moral psychol
ogy transparent; one is not continually being "surprised" when
one examines the historical record, because tis is the psychol
ogy the contract prescribes. (The theory of th Racial Contract
is not cynical, because cynicism really implies theoretical
breakdown, a despairing throwing up of the hands and a renun
ciation of the project of understanding the world and human
evil for a mystified yearning for a prelapsarian man. The "Ra
cial Contract" is simply realist-willing to look at the facts
without flinching, to explain that if you start with this, then
I
you will end up with tha t. )
Similarly, the "Racial Contract" makes the Jewlsh
Holocaust-misleadingly designated as the Holocaust----c- om
prehensible, distancing itself theoretically both from positions
that would render it cognitively opaque, inexplicably sui gene
ris, and from positions that would downplay the racial dimen
sion and assimilate it to the undifferentiated terrorism of
German fascism. From the clouded perspective of the Third
World, the question in Arno Mayer's title Why Did the Heav
ens Not Darken! betrays a climatic Eurocentrism, which fails
to recognize that the blue skies were only smiling on Europe.
The influential view he cites (not his own) is typical: "Prima
facie the catastrophe which befell the Jews during the Second
World War was unique in its own time and unprecedented in
history. There are strong reasons to believe that the victimiza
tion of the Jews was so enormous and atrocious as to be com
pletely outside the bounds of all other human experience. If
that is the case, what the Jews were subjected to will forever
defy historical reconstruction and interpretation, let alone
comprehension."30 But this represents an astonishing white
amnesia about the actual historical record. Likewise, the de
spairing question of how there can be poetry after Auschwitz
evokes the puzzled nonwhite reply of how there could have
1 02
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
been poetry before Auschwitz, and after the killing fields in
America, Africa, Asia. The standpoint of Native America,
black Africa, colonial Asia, has always been aware that Euro
pean civilization rests on extra-European barbarism, so that
the Jewish Holocaust, the "Judeocide" (Mayer), is by no means
a bolt from the blue, an unfathomable anomaly in the develop
ment of the West, but unique only in that it represents use of
the Racial Contract against Europeans. I say this in no way
to diminish its horror, of course, but rather to deny its singular
ity, to establish its conceptual identity with other policies
carried out by Europe in non-Europe for hundreds of years,
but using methods less efficient than those made possible by c
advanced mid-twentieth-century industrial society. .
In the twilight world of the Cold War, the term "blowback"
was used in American spy jargon to refer to "u expectedand
negative-effects at home that result from covert operations
overseas," particularly from (what were called) "black" opera
tions of assassination and government. 6verthrow.31 A case can
be made for seeing the "blowback" ho.m ,the overseas ("white")
operations of European conquest, settlement, slavey, and co
lonialism as consolidating in the modern European mind a
racialized ethic; that, in combination with traditional anti
Semitism, eventually boomeranged, returning to Erope itself
to facilitate the Jewish Holoaust. Forty years ago, in his clas
sic polemic Discourse on Colonialism; Aime Cesaire pointed
out the implicit double standard in European "outrage" at
Nazism: "It is Nazism, yes, but . . . before [Europeans] were
its victims, they were its accomplices; that they .tolerated that
Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it,
shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had
been applied only to non-European peoples . . . . [Hitler's crime
is] the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures
which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs
1 03

THE RACIAL CONTRACT
of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa. 11 32
The Racial Contract continues, with a truly grisly irony, to
manifest itself even in the condemnation of the consequences
of the Racial Contract, since the racial mass murdd of Europe
ans is placed on a different moral plane than the racial mass
murder of non-Europeans. Similarly, Kiernan argues that King
Leopold's Congo "cast before it the shadow that was to turn
into Hitler's empire inside Europe. . . . Attitudes acquired dur
ing the subjugation of the other continents now reproduced
themselves at home."33 So in this explanatory framework,
unlike the subsumption of the death camps under a derced
fascism, the racial dimension and the establishment of Jewih
nonwhite subpersonhood are explanatorily crucial. If, as ear
lier argued, the Jews were by this time basically "off-white".
rather than "nonwhite," assimilated into the population of
persons, the Nazis could be said to be in local violation of the
global Racial Contract by excluding from the club of White
ness groups already grudgingly admitted, by doing to Europe
ans (even borderline ones) what (by then) was only supposed
to be done to non-Europeans.
Postwar writings on this subject by Europeans, both in Eu
rope and in North America, have generally sought to block
these conceptual connections, representing Nazi policy as
more deviant than it actually was/ for example, in the Historik
erstreit, the German debate over the uniqueness of the Jewish
Holocaust. The dark historical record of European imperialism
has been forgotten. Robert Harris's chilling 1992 novel Father
land, a classic in the alternative-worlds science fiction genre,
depicts a future in which the Nazis have won World WaI II
and have eradicated from the record their killing of the Jews,
so that only scattered evidence survives.34 But in certain re
spects we live in an actual, nonalternative world where the
victors of racial killing really did win and have reconstructed
1 04
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
and falsified the record accordingly. Holocaust denial and Ho
locaust apologia thus long precede the post- I 945 period, going
back all the way to the original response to the revelations
of Las Casas's Devastation of the Indies in 1 5 42.35 Yet, with
few exceptions, only recently has revisionist white historiogra
phy belatedly begun to catch up with this nonwhite
conceptualization-hence the title of David StannaId's book
on the Columbian conquest, American Holocaust; the related
title of an anthology (cited by Noam Chomsky in his Year 501)
put out i n Germany i n anticipation o f the quincentenaIY, Das
Fiinfhundert-jiihrige Reich (Five-hundred year reich); and the
Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist's recently translateti "Extermi
nate All the Brutes, which explicitly links the famous injunc
"
tion of Conrad's Kurtz to Nazi prctice: "Auschwitz was the
modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on
which European world domination had long since rested. . / .
And when what had been done in the heart of darkness was
repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one
wished to admit what everyone knw. . . . It is not knowledge
' t
we lack. What is missing is the ' curage o understand what
"
we know and draw conclusions."36
The debate will doubtless continue for many decades to
come. But on a closing note, it does not seem inappropriate
to get the opinion fthat well-known moral and political
theorist Adolf Hitler (surely a man with so ething worthwhile
to say on the subject), who, looking ahead in a 1 9 3 2 speech,
"explicitly located his Lebensraum project within the long
trajectory of European racial conquest."37 As he explained to
his presumably attentive audience, you cannot understand
"the economically privileged supremacy of the white race over
the rest of the world" except by relating it to II a political
concept of supremacy which has been peculiar to the white
1 05
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
race as a natural phenomenon for many centuries and which
it has upheld as such to the outer world":
Take for example India: England did not acquire India i a
lawful and legitimate manner, but rather without regar d to
the natives' wishes, views, or declarations of rights. . . . Just
as Cortes or Pizarro demanded for themselves Central
America and the northern states of South America not on
the basis of any legal claim, but from the absolute, inborn
feeling of superiority of the white race. The settlement of
,
the North American continent was similarly a consequence
not of any higher claim in a democratic or international
sense, but rather of a consciousness of what is right which
had its sole roots in the conviction of the superiority 'and
thus the right of the white race.
So his plan was just to uphold this inspiring Western tradition,
this racial "right to dominate (Herrenrecht)," this "frame of
mind . . . which has conquered the world" for the white race,
since "from this political view there evolved the basis for the
economic takeover of the rest of the world. "38 In other words,
he saw himself as simply doing at home what his fellow Euro
peans had long been doing abroad.
Finally, the theory of the Racial Contract; by separating
whiteness as phenotype/racial classification from W hiteness
as a politicoeconomic system committed to white supremacy,
opens a theoretical space for white repudiation of the Con
tract. (One could then distinguish "being white" from "be
ing W hite.")
There is an interesting point of contrast here with the social
contract. One obvious early objection to the notion of society's
being based on a "contract" was that even if an original found
ing contract had existed, it wouldn't bind later generations,
1 06
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
who hadn't signed it. There have been various attempts by
contractarians to get around this problem, the best-known
being Locke's notion of "tacit consent."39 The idea is that if
you choose as an adult to stay in your country of birth and
make use of its benefits, then you have "tacitly" consented
to obey the government and thus to be bound by the contract.
But David Hume is famously scathing about this claim, saying
that the notion of tacit consent is vacuous where there is no
real possibility of opting out by moving to a no-longer-existent
state of nature or of being able to emigrate when you have
no particular skills and no other language but your mother
tongue.40 You stay because you have no real choice.
But for the Racial Contract, it is different. There is a real
choice for whites, though admittedly a difficult one. The rejec
tion of the Racial Contract and the normed inequities of the
white polity does not require one to leave the country but to
speak out and struggle against the terms of the Contract. So
in this case, moral/political judgments about one's "consent"
to the legitimacy of the politicaL system and conclusions about
one's effectively hav in become a.signatory to the "contract,"
are aproposand so are judgments . of one's culpability. By
unquestioningly "going along with things," by accepting all
the privileges of whiteness with concomitant complicity in
the system of white supremacy, one can be said to have con
sented to W hiteness.
And in fact there have always been praiseworthy whites
anticolonialists, abolitionists, opponents of imperialism, civil
rights activists, resisters of apartheid-who have recognized
the existence and immorality of W hiteness as a political sys
tem, challenged its legitimacy, and insofar as possible, refused
the Contract. (Inasmuch as mere skin color will automatically
continue to privilege them, of course, this identification with
the oppressed can usually be only partial.) Thus the interesting
1 07
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
moral/political phenomenon of the white renegade, the race
traitor in the language of the Klan (accurate enough insofar
as "race" here denotes W hiteness),4l the colonial explorer who
"goes native," the soldier in French Indochina who contracts
' .'
Ie mal iaune, the yellow disorder (the perilous illness of "at-
tachment , , . to Indochina's landscape, people , , . and cul
ture"),42 the nigger-, Injun-, or Jew-lover. These individuals
betray the white polity in the name of a broader definition of
the polis-"Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity"43-
thus becoming "renegades from the States, traitors to ,their
. country and to civilization," "a white Injun, and there's noth
ing more despicable."44 For as the term signifies, where moral
ity has been racialized, the practice of a genuinely color-blind
,
ethic requires the repudiation of one's Herrenvolk standing
and its accompanying moral epistemology, thus eliciting the
appropriate moral condemnation from the race loyalists and
white signatories who have not repudiated either.
The level of commitment and sacrifice will, of course, vary.
Some have written exposes of the hidden truth of the Racial
Contract-Las Casas's Devastation of the Indies; abolitionist
literature; the French writer Abbe Raynal's call for black slave
revolution; Mark Twain's writings for the Anti-Imperialist
League (usually suppressed as an embarrassment by his biogra
phers, as Chomsky notes);45 Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's
principled oppositional journalism against their countryis co
lonial war. Some have tried to save some of its victims-the
Underground Railroad; Aborigines Protection Societies; Oskar
Schindler's Jewish charges; Don Macleod, the Australian white
man "accepted as an honorary Aborigine, who helped organize
the first Aboriginal strike in the Pilbara in 1 946";46 Hugh
Thompson, the American helicopter pilot who threatened to
fire on his fellow soldiers unless they stopped massacring
Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. 47 Some have actually given
1 08
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
their lives for the struggle-the white American antislavery
revolutionary John Brown; the white members of the African
National Congress who died trying to abolish apartheid. But
the mere fact of their existence shows what was possible,
throwing into contrast and rendering open for moral judgment
the behavior of their fellow whites, who chose to accept W hite
ness instead.
The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the
real determinant of (most) white moral/politial practice and thus as
the real moral/political agreement to be challenged.
If the epistemology of the signatorie;l, the agents, of the
Racial Contract requires evasion and denial of the realities of
race, the epistemology of the victims, the objects, of the Racial
Contract is, unsurprisingly, focused on these realities them
selves. (So there is a reciprocal relationship, the Racial Con
tract tracking white moral/political consciousness, the
reaction to the Racial Contract tracking nonwhite moral/po
litical consciousness and stimuiating a puzzled investigation
of that white moral/political consciousness.) The term " stand
point theory" is now routinely used to signify the notion that
in understanding the workings of a system of oppression, a
perspective from the bottom up is more likely to be accurate
than one from the top down. W hatis involved here, then, is
a "racial" version of standpoint theory, a perspectival cognitive
advantage that is grounded in the phenomenological experi
ence of the disjuncture between official (white) reality and
actual (nonwhite) experience, the "double-consciousness" of
which W. E. B. Du Bois spoke.48 This differential racial experi
ence generates an alternative moral and political perception
of social reality which is encapsulated in the insight from the
1 09
 THE RACIAL CONTRACT
black American folk tradition I have used as the epigraph
of this book: the central realization, summing up the Racial
Contract, that "when white people say 'Justice,' they mean
'Just Us.' "
Nonwhites have always (at least in first encounter ') 'been
bemused or astonished by the invisibility of the Racial Con
tract to whites, the fact that whites have routinely talked in
universalist terms even when it has been quite clear that the
scope has really been limited to themselves. Correspondingly,
nonwhites, with no vested material or psychic interest in the
'
Racial Contract-objects rather than subjects of it, vieing it
from outside rather than inside, subpersons rather than
persons-are (at least before ideological conditioning) able to
see its terms quite clearly. Thus the hypocrisy of the racial
polity is most transparent to its victims. The corollary is that
nonwhite interest in white moral and political theory has
necessarily been focused less on the details of the particular
competing moral and political candidates (utilitarianism ver
sus deontology versus natural rights theory; liberalism versus
conservatism versus socialism) than in the unacknowledged
Racial Contract that has usually framed their functioning.
The variable that makes the most difference to the fate of
nonwhites is not the fine- or even coarse-grained conceptual
divergences of the different theories themselves (all have their
Herrenvolk variants), but whether or not the subclause invok
ing the Racial Contract, thus putting the theory into Herren
volk mode, has been activated. The details of the moral
theories thus become less important than the metatheory, the
Racial Contract, in which they are. embedded. The crucial
question is whether nonwhites are counted as full persons,
part of the population covered by the moral operator, or not.
The preoccupation of nonwhite moral and political thought
with issues of race, puzzling alike to a white liberalism predi-
110
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
cated on colorless atomic individuals and a white Marxism
predicated on colorless classes in struggle, thus becomes read
ily explicable once the reality of the Racial Contract has been
conceded. What is involved is neither a simple variant of tradi
tional European nationalism (to which it is sometimes assimi
lated) nor a mysterious political project unfolding in some
alien theoretical space (as in the mutually opaque language
games postulated by postmodernism). The unifying concep
tual space within which both orthodox white moral/political
philosophy and unorthodox nonwhite moral/political philoso
phy are developing is the space that locates the (mythical)
social contract on the same plane as the (real) Racial Contract,
being predicated on the translation of "race" into the mutually
commensurable and mutually intelligible language of per
sonhood, and thereby demonstrating that these are contiguous,
indeed identical, spaces-not so much a different conceptual
universe as a recognition of the dark matter of the existing
one. Personhood can be taken for ranted by some, while it
(and all that accompanies it) has to be fought for by. others, so
that the general human p'alitil project of struggling for a
better society involves a diffe ient trajectory for nonwhites.
It is no accident, then, that l:e moral an'd political theory
and practical struggles of nonwhites have so often centered on
race, the marker of personhood and subpersonhood, inclusion
within or exclusion from the racial polity. The formal con
tractarian apparatus I have tried to develop will not be articu
lated as such. But the crucial notions of the person/subperson
differentiation, the correspondIngly racially structured moral
code (Herrenvolk ethics), and the white-supremacist character
of the polity can be found in one form or another everywhere
in Native American, black American, and Third and Fourth
World anticolonial thought.
Sitting Bull asks: " What treaty that the whites have kept
111
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
has the red man broken ? Not one. W hat treaty that the white
man ever made with us have they kept ? Not one. W hen I was
a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their
land. . . . W here are our lands? W ho owns them? W hat .white
man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his mn'!.ey ?
Yet, they say I am a thief. . . . W hat law have I broken ?' Is it
wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because
my skin is red? " Ward Churchill, another Native American,
characterizes European settlers as a self-conceived "master
race." David Walker complains that whites consider blacks
"not of the human family," forcing blacks "to prove to them
ourselves, that we are MEN. " W. E. B. Du Bois represents blacks
as a "tertium quid, " "somewhere between men and cattle,"
comments that "Liberty, Justice, and Right" are marked '''For
W hite People Only,' " and suggests that "the statement 'I am
white'" is becoming "the one fundamental tenet of our practi
cal morality." Richard Wright analyzes "the ethics of living
Jim Crow." Marcus Garvey concludes that blacks are "a race
without respect." Jawaharlal Nehru claims that British policy
in India is "that of the herrenvolk and the master race." Martin
Luther King Jr. describes the feeling of "forever fighting a
degenerating sense of 'nobodiness.' " Malcolm X asserts that
America "has not only deprived us of the right to be a citizen,
she has deprived us of the right to be human beings, the right
to be recognized and respected as men and women. . . . We are
fighting for recognition as human beings." Frantz Fanon maps
a colonial world divided between "two different species," a
"governing race" and "zoological" natives. Aime Cesaire ar
gues that "the colonizer . . . in order to ease his conscience
gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal. . . .
colonization ='thingification.' " Australian Aborigines in a
I 9 82 protest statement at the Commonwealth Games in Bris
bane point out that "since the W hite invasion . . . [o]ur human-
112
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
ity is being degraded and our history distorted by strangers. . . .
Before the World, we accuse W hite Australia (and her Mother,
England) of crimes against humanity and the planet. The past
two centuries of colonisation is proof of our accusation. We '
hereby demand yet again recognition of our humanity and
our land rights."49 The central moral commonality uniting
all their experiences is the reality of racial subordination,
necessarily generating a different moral topography from the
one standardly examined in white ethical discourse.
Correspondingly, the polity was usually thought of in racial
terms, as white ruled, and this perspective would become
global in the period of formal colonial administration. Political
theory is in part about who the main actors are, and for this
unacknowledged polity they are neither the atomic individuals
of classic liberal thought nor the classes of Marxist theory
but races. The various native and colonial peoples' attempts
(usually unsuccessful, too little and too late ) to forge a racial
unity-Pan-Indianism, Pan-Africanism, PanArabism, Pan
Asianism, Pan-Islamism-arose in response to an already
achieved white unity, a Pan-Europeanism formalized andcin
corporated by the terms of the Racial Contract.
In the period of de jure global white supremacy, of colonial
ism and slavery, this solidarity w:as clearly perceived by whites
also. "That race is everything, is-sitp.ply a fact" writes Scots
man Robert Knox in The Races of Men ( I 8 5 0),50 and theories
of the necessity of racial struggle, race war, against the subordi
nate races are put forward as obvious. Darwin's work raised
hopes in some quarters that natural selection (perhaps with a
little help from its friends) would sweep away the remaining
inferior races, as it had already clone so providentially in the
Americas and Tasmania, so that .the planet as a whole could
be cleared for white settlement Y And after that only the sky
would be the limit . In fact, even the sky would not be the
113
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
limit, for there was always the solar system. Cecil Rhodes
dreamed that perhaps he could "annex the planets" for Britain:
,,
"Where there is space, there is hope. 52
But alas, this noble dream was not to be realized. Even with
encouragement, nonwhites did not die fast enough. So whites
had to settle for colonial rule over stubbornly growing ative
populations, while of course keeping a watchful eye out for
both rebellion and subversive notions of self-government. Wit
ness the various colored perils-red (Native American, that
is), black, and yellow-that have haunted the European and
Euro-implanted imagination. "Europe, fJ Kiernan comments,
"thought of its identity in terms of race or color and plagued
itself with fears of the Yellow Peril or a Black Peril-boomer
ang effects, as they might be called, of a W hite Peril from
which the other continents were more tangibly suffering."53
The political framework is quite explicitly predicated on the
notion that whites everywhere have a common interest in
maintaining global white supremacy against insurrections
conceived of in racial terms. At the turn of the century, Europe
ans were worried about the . "vast ant-heap" filled with
"soldier-ants" of China, while "similar fears were in the air
about a huge black army," threatening a race war of revenge
led by "dusky Napoleons. "54
Though there were occasional breaches for strategic national
advantage, international white racial solidarity was generally
demonstrated in the joint actions to suppress and isolate slave
rebellions and colonial uprisings: the boycott of Haiti, the only
successful slave revolution in history (and, noncoincidentally,
today the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere), the
common intervention against the 1 899-1 900 Boxer. rebellion
in China, the concern raised by the 1 905 Japanese victory over
Russia. As late as the early twentieth century, books were still
being published with such warning titles as The Passing of
114
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
the Great Race and The Rising Tide of Color against White
World-Supremacy.55 Intra-European differences and conflicts
were real enough but would be quickly put aside in the face of
the nonwhite threat: "In the course of their rivalries Europeans
exchanged many hard words, and sometimes abused each other
in order to please a non-European people. . . . But when it came
to any serious colonial upheaval, white men felt their kinship,
and Europe drew together . . . . Above all, and very remarkably,
despite innumerable crises over rival claims the European
countries managed from the War of American Independence
onward to avoid a single colonial war among themselves."56
This unity ended in the twentieth century with the outbreak
of World War I, which was in part an interimperialist war over
competing colonial claims. But despite nonwhite agitation and
military participation (largely as cannon fodder) in the armies
of their respective mother countries, the postwar settlement
led not to decolonization but to a territorial redistribution
among the colonial powers themselves. ("OK, I'll take this
one, and you can take that one.") In the interwar years Japan's
Pan-Asiatic Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was seen
by most white Western leaders as a threat to global white
supremacy. Indeed, as late as World War II, the popular Ameri
can writer Pearl Buck had to wain her readers that colonized
peoples would not continue to pt up with global white domi
nation, and that unless there -was change their discontent
would lead to "the ongest of human,wars . . . the war between
the white man and his world and the colored man and his
world."57
Corresponding to this global white solidarity transcending
national boundaries, the virtual white polity, nonwhites' com
mon interest in abolishing the Racial Contract manifested
itself in patterns of partisan emotional identification which
from a modern, more nationalistic perspective now seem quite
115
 "NATURALIZED" MERITS
THE RACIAL CONTRACT

"trans
bizarre. In 1879, for example, when the King of Burma learned economic and political world-system," thus generating
62 It is this world
of the Zulu defeat of a British army at Isandhlwana, he immedi national identities of white and nonwhite."
Bois was
ately announced his intention of marching on Rangoon.58 In this moral and political reality-that W. E. B. Du
ist statem ent "To
1905 Indians cheered the Japanese victory over the czar's describing in his famous 1900 Pan-African
twentieth
(white) armies in the Russo-Japanese war.59 In the Spnish the Nations of the World": "The problem of the
century is the problem of the color line," since, as he would
American War, black Americans raised doubts about the point
but clear
of being "a black man in the army of the white man sent to later point out, too many have accepted "that tacit
white race alone the
kill the brown man," and a few blacks actually went over to modern philosophy which assigns to the
. . . will
the side of Emilio Aguinaldo's Filipino forces.6o After Pearl hegemony of the world and assumes that other races
of the white s or die
Harbor, the ominous joke circulated in the American press of either be content to serve the interests
world that
a black sharecropper who comments to his white boss, "By out before their all-conquering march."63 It is this
esia) Confe rence, a
the way, Captain, I hear the Japs done declared war on you later produced the 1 9 5 5 Bandung (Indon
"under
white folks"; black civil rights militants demanded the meeting of twenty-nine Asian and African nations, the
. t's phrase , whose
li double-VICt ory," "V'lctory at H ome as We 11 as Abroad"; Japa- dogs of the human race" in Richard Wrigh
such
nese intelligence considered the possibility of an alliance with decision to discuss "racialism and colonialism" caused
meeti ng that even
black Americans in a domestic colored front against white consternation in the West at the time,64 the
ment.
supremacy; and white Americans worried about black loy tually led to the formation of the Non-Aligned Move
the creati on of
alty.61 The 1954 Vietnamese victory over the French at Dien And it is this world that stimulated, in 1975,
alian
Bien Phu (like the Japanese capture of Singapore in World War the World Council" of Indigenous Peoples, uniting Austr
ican Indian s.65
II) was in part seen as a racial triumph, the defeat of a white Aborigines, New Zealand Maoris, and Amer
ry
by a brown people, a blow against the arrogapce of global If to white readers this intellectual world, only half a centu
conce pts, it is a
white supremacy. distant, now seems like a universe of alien
act in
So on the level of the popular consciousness of nonwhites tribute to the success of the r.ewritten Racial Contr
so that white domi
particularly in the first phase of the Racial Contract, but linger transforming the terms of public discol,lle
ov points
ing on into the second phase-racial self-identification was nation is now conceptually invisible. A.s Leon Poliak
(on Europ ean soil,
deeply embedded, with the notion that nonwhites everywhere out, the embarrassment of the death camps
sanitiza
were engaged in some kind of common political struggle, so anyway) led the postwar European intelligentsia to a
e the aberrant
that a victory for one was a victory for all. The different battles tion of the past record, in which racism becam
r Gobi
around the world against slavery, colonialism, jim crow, the invention of scapegoat figures such as Joseph-Arthu
ht is thus made to
"color bar," European imperialism, apartheid were in a sense neau: "A vast chapter of western' thoug
corre
all part of a common struggle against the Racial Contract . As disappear by sleight of hand, anq this conjuring trick
orical level, to the
Gary Okihiro points out, what came into existence was "a sponds, on the psychological or psychohist
embar-
global racial formation that complemented and buttressed the collective suppression of troubling memories and

117
116
THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS

h is denied to subp
rassing truths."66 That the revival of Anglo-American political privileged by the Racial Contract, but whic
, the importance of
philosophy takes place in this period, the present epoch of the ersons. Particularly for blacks, ex-slaves
respect from whites is
de facto Racial Contract, partially explains its otherworldly developing self-respect and demanding
"how a man was made
race insensitivity. The history of imperialism, colonialism, crucial. Frederick Douglass recounts
how a slave was made
and genocide, the reality of systemic racial exclusion, are ob J
a slave " ana promises "you shall see
> this struggle is still in
fuscated in seemingly abstract and general categories that a man 67 But a hundred years later
originally were restricted to white citizens. progress. "Negroes want to be treat ed
like men ," wrote James
ghtforward statement,
But the overtly political battles-for emancipation, decolo Baldwin in the I 9 5 0S, "a perfectly strai
have mastered Kant,
nization, civil rights, land rights-were only part of this strug cont aining only seven words. People who
Bible find this state
gle. The terms of the Racial Contract norm nonwhite persons Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the
themselves, establishing morally, epistemically, and aestheti ment utterly impenetrable."6B
be an epistemic di
cally their ontological inferiority. To the extent that nonwhites . Linked with this personal struggle will
racially mystificatory
accept this, to the extent that they also were signatories to mension, cognitive resistance to the
reconstruction of past
the Contract, there is a corollary personal dimension to this aspects of white theory, the painstaking
ial gaps and erase the
struggle which is accommodated with difficulty, if at all, in and present necessary to fill in the cruc
pean worldview. One
the categories of mainstream political philosophy. Operating slanders of the globally dominant Euro
powers, to develop
on the terrain of the social contract and thus taking personhood has to learn to trust one's own cognitive
explanation, overarch
for granted, failing to recognize the reality of the Racial Con one's own concepts, insights, modes of
hegemony of concep
tract, orthodox political theory has difficulty making sense of ing theories, and to oppose the epistemic
rt and suppress the
the multidimensionality of oppositional nonwhite political tual frameworks designed in part to thwa
thought. exploration of such matters; one has to
think against the gra n.
concealed by the RaCIal
What does it require for a subperson to assert himself or There are excavations of the histories
rican, African and
herself politically? To begin with, it means simply, or not so Contract: Native American, black Ame
rization of their pasts,
simply, claiming the moral status of personhood. So it means Asian and Pacific investigation and valo
. . agery" and state-of-
challenging the white-constructed ontology that has deemed g1Vmg the lie to the description. nf "sav
. -
,,
istory. 69 The exposure
one a "body impolitic," an entity not entitled to assert per nature existence of "peoples without.h
rism, not-so-innocent
sonl:'lOod in the first place. In a sense one has to fight an internal of the misrepresentations of Euro cent
is thus part of the
battle before even advancing onto the ground of external com "white lies" and "white mythologies,"
od.7 The long hiory
bat. One has to overcome the internalization of subpersonhood political project of reclaiming personho
oppositional tradltlon,
prescribed by the Racial Contract and recognize one's own of what has been called, in the black
ssary political response
humanity, resisting the official category of despised aboriginal, "vindicationist" scholarship,71 is a nece
, which has no corre
natural slave, colonial ward. One has to learn the basic self to the fabrications of the Racial Contract
c. ontract because Euro-
respect that can casually be assumed by Kantian persons, those late in the political theory of the social

118 119
 THE RACIAL CONTRACT
"NATURALIZED" MERITS

peans were in cultural control of their own

past and, so, could
,
being hypothetical, subjunctive exercises in ideal theory. So
be confident it would not be misrepresent
ed (or, perhaps better, the fact that actual societies were not based on these norms,
that the misrepresentations would be their
own). even if true, and unfortunate, is simply irrelevant. These are
Finally, the soma tic aspect of the Racial
Contract-the nec just two different kinds of projects.
essary reference it makes to the body-ex
plains the body poli The discussion at the beginning should have made clear why
tics that nonwhites have often incorporated
into their struggle. I think this answer misses the point. Insofar as the moral
Global white supremacy denies subperson
s not merely moral theory and political philosophy of present-day contractarian
and cognitive but also aesthetic parity.
Particularly for the ism are trying to prescribe ideals for a just society, which are
black body, phenotypically most distant
from the Caucasoid presumably intended to help transform our present nonideal
somatic norm, the implications often are
the attempt to trans society, it is obviously important to get clear what the facts
form oneself as far as possible into an imit
body.72 Thus the assertion of full black
ation of the whit are. Moral and political prescription will depend in part on
personhood has also empirical claims and theoretical generalizations, accounts of
sometimes manifested itself in the self-c
onscious repudiation what happened in the past and what is happening now, as well
of somatic transformation and the proc
lamation "Black is as more abstract views about how society and the state work
beautiful ! " For mainstream political philo
sophy this is merely and where political power is located. If the facts are radically
a fashion statement; for a theory informed
by the Racial Con different from those that are conventionally represented, the
tract, it is part of the political project of recla
iming personhood. prescriptions are also likely to be radically different.
Now as I pointed out at the start, and indeed throughout,
the absence from most white moral/political philosophy of
The "Racial Contract" as a theory is explanatorily superior to the discussions of race and white supremacy would lead one to
raceless social contract in accounting for the political and moral think that race and racism have been marginal to the history
realities of the world and in helping to guide normative theory. of the West. And this belief is reinforced by the mainstream
conceptualizations of the polity themselves, which portray it
The "Racial Contract" as a naturalized acco
unt (henceforth as essentially raceless, whether in the dominant view of an
simply the "Racial Contract") is theoretic
ally superior to the individualist liberal democracy, o in the minority radical
raceless social contract as a model of the
actual world and, Marxist view of a class society. So it is not that mainstream
correspondingly, of what needs to be done
to reform it. I there- con tractarians have no picture. (Indeed it is impossible to theo
fore advocate the supplementation of stand
ard social contract rize without some picture.) Rather, they have an actual (tacit)
discussions with an account of the "Racial
Contract. " picture, which, in its exclusion or marginalization of race and
It might be replied that I am making
a kind of II category its typically sanitized, whitewashed, and amnesiac account
mistake," since even if my claims abou
t the centrality of of European imperialism and settlement, is deeply flawed and
racism to recent global history are true,
modern contractarian misleading. So the powerful image of the idealized contract,
ism has long since given up real-world expl
anatory pretensions, in the absence of an explicit counterimage, continues to shape

1 20
1 21
 THE RACIAL CONTRACT
our descriptive as well as normative theorizations. By provid
ing no history, contemporary contractarianism encourages its
audience to fill in a mystified history, which turns out to look
oddly like the (ostensibly) repudiated history in the original
contract itself ! No one actually believes nowadays, of course,
that people formally came out of the wilderness and signed a
contract. But there is the impression that the modern European
nation-states were not centrally affected by their imperial
history and that societies such as the United States were
founded on noble moral principles meant to include everyone,
,
but unfortunately, there were some deviations. 73 The "Racial
Contrac t " explodes this picture as mythical, identifying it as
itself an artifact of the Racial Contract in the second, de facto
phase of white suprema cy. ThUS-in the standard array of
metaphors of perceptual/conceptual revolution-it effects a
gestalt shift, reversing figure and ground, switching paradigms,
inverting "norm" and "deviation," to emphasize that non
white racial exclusion from personhood was the actual norm.
Racism, racial self-identification, and race thinking are then
not in the least "surprising," "anomalous," "puzzling," incon
gruent with Enlightenment European humanism, but required
by the Racial Contract as part of the terms for the European
appropriation of the world. So in a sense s tandatd contractarian
discussions are fundamentally misleading, because they have
things backward to begin with: what has usually been taken
(when it has been noticed at all) as the radst "exception" has
really been the rule; what has been taken as the "rule " the
'
ideal norm, has really been the exception.
The second, related reason that the "Racial Contract"
should be part of the necessary foundation for contemporary
political theory is that our theorizing and moralizing a bout
the sociopolitical facts are affected in characteristic ways by
social structure. There is a reflexiveness to political theory,
1 22
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
in which it theorizes about itself and later theorists critique
the blindnesses of earlier ones. The classic texts of the central
thinkers of the Western political tradition-for example, Plato,
Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Marx-typically provide not merely
nrmative judgments but mappings of social ontologies and
politi al epistemologies which explain why the normative
judgments of others have gone astray. These theorists recog
nized that to bring about the ideal polity, one needs to under
stand how the structure and workings of the actual polity
may interfere with our perception of the social truth. Our
characteristic patterns of understanding and misunder
standing of the world are themselves influenced by the way
the world is and by the way we ourselves are; whether naturally
or as shaped and molded by that world.
So one needs criteria for political knowing, whether through
penetrating the illusory appearances of this empirical world
(Plato), through learning to discern natural law (Hobbes,
Locke), through rejecting abstraction for the accumulated wis
dom of "prejudice" (Burke), or through demystifying oneself
of bourgeois and patriarchal ideology (Marxism, feminism).
Particularly for alternative, oppositionai theory (as with the
last two), the claim will be that an oppressive polity character
ized by group domination distorts our cognizing in ways that
themselves need to be theorized about . We are blinded to
realities that we should see, taking for granted as natural what
are in fact human-created structures. So we need to see differ
ently, ridding ourselves of class and . gender bias, coming to
recognize as political what we ha'd previously thought of as
apolitical or personal, doing conceptual innovation, reconceiv
ing the familiar, looking with new . eyes at the old world
around us.
Now if the "Racial Contract",is right, existing conceptions
of the polity are foundationally deficient. There is obviously
1 23
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
all the difference in the world between saying the system is
.
basically sound despite some unfortunate racist deviations,
and saying that the polity is racially structured, the state
white-supremacist, and races themselves significant existents
that an adequate political ontology needs to accommodate. So
the dispute would be not merely about the facts but about
why these facts have gone so long unapprehended and untheo
rized in white moral/political theory. Could it be that member
ship in the Herrenvolk, the race privileged by this political
system, tends to prevent recognition of it as a political system?
'
Indeed, it could. So not only would meeting this political
challenge imply a radically different "metanarrative" of the
history that has brought us to this point, but it would also
require, as I have sketched, a rethinking and reconceptualiza
tion of the existing conventional moral/political apparatus and
a self-consciously reflexive epistemic. examination of how this
deficient apparatus has affected the moral psychology of whites
and directed their attention away from certain realities. By
its crucial silence on race and the corresponding opacities of
its conventional conceptual array, the raceless social contract
and the raceless world of contemporary moral and political
theory render mysterious the actual political issues and con
cerns that have historically preoccupied a large section of the
world's population.
Think of the rich colorful tapestry over the last two centu
ries of abolitionism, racial vindicationism, aboriginal land
claims, antiimperial and anticolonial movements, antiapart
heid struggle, searches to reclaim racial and cultural heritages,
and ask yourself what thread of it ever appears within the
bleached weave of the standard First World political philosophy
text . It is undeniable (one would think) that these struggles
are political, but dominant categories obscure our understand
ing of them. They seem to be taking place in a different concep-
1 24
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
tual space from the one inhabited by mainstream political
theory. One will . search in vain for them in most standard
histories and contemporary surveys of Western political
thought. The recent advent of discussions of "multicul
turaY-sm" is welcome, but what needs to be appreciated is that
these are issues of political power, not just mutual misconcep
tions resulting from the clash of cultures. To the extent that
"race" is assimilated to " ethnicity," white supremacy remains
unmentioned, and the historic Racial Contract-prescribed
connection between race and personhood is ignored, these
discussions, in my opinion, fail to make the necessary drastic
theoretical correction. Thus they still take place within a
conventional, if expanded, framework. If I am right, what
needs to be recognized is that side by side with the existing
political structures familiar to all of us, the standard subject
matter of political theory-absolutism and constitutionalism,
dictatorship and democracy, capitalism and socialism-there
has also been an unnamed global political structure-global
white suprem a cy-and these struggles are in part struggles
against this system. Until the system is named and seen as
such, no serious theoretical appr!!ciation of the significance
of these phenomena is possible.
Another virtue of the i'Racial Contract" is that it simultane
ously recognizes the reality of race (causal power, theoretical
centrality) and demystifies race (positing race as con
structed),74 Historically, the most influential theories of race
have themselves been racist, varieties of more or less sophisti
cated biological determiniSm, rom naive pre-Darwinian
speculations to the later more elaborated views of nineteenth
century Social Darwinism and twentieth-century Nazi Ras
senkunde, race ,science. To speak of "race theory" in the offi
cially nonracist climate of t,Oday is thus likely to trigger alarm
bells: hasn't it been proven that race is unreal ? But it is a false
1 25
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
dichotomization to assume that the only alternatives are race
as nonexistent and race as biological essence. Contemporary
"critical race theorY"-of which this book could be seen as
an example-adds the adjective specifically to differentiate
itself from the essentialist views of the past .75 Race is sociopo
litical rather than biological, but it is nonetheless real.
Thus, on the one hand, unlike mainstream white theory,
liberal and radical, the "Racial Contract" sees that "race" and
"white supremacy" are themselves critical theoretical terms
that must be incorporated into the vocabulary of an adequate
sociopolitical theory, that society is neither just a collection
of atomic individuals nor just a structure of workers and capi
talists. On the other hand, the "Racial Contract" demystifies
race, distancing itself from the "oppositional" biological deter
minisms (melanin theory, "sun people" and "ice people") and
occasional deplorable anti-Semitism of some recent elements
of the black tradition, as the 1 9 60s promise of integration fails
and intransigent social structures and growing white recalci
trance are increasingly conceptualized in naturalistic terms.
The "Racial Contract" thus places itself within the sensible
mainstream of moral theory by not holding people responsible
for what they cannot help. Even liberal whites of good will
are sometimes made uneasy by racial politics,. because an un
sophisticatedly undifferentiated denunciatory vocabulary
("white") does not seem to allow for standard political/moral
distinctions between a politics of choice-absolutist and
democrat, fascist and liberal-for which it is rational that we
should be held responsible, and a skin color and phenotype
that, after all, we cannot help. By recognizing it as a political
system, the "Racial Contract" voluntarizes race in the same
way that the social contract voluntarizes the creation of soci
ety and the state. It distinguishes between whiteness as pheno
type/genealogy and W hiteness as a political commitment to
1 26
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
white supremacy, thus making conceptual room for "white
renegades" and "race traitors." Anfi its aim is not to replace
one Racial Contract with another of a different color but ulti
mately to eliminate race (not as innocent human variety but
as ontological superiority and inferiority, as differential enti
tlement and privilege) altogether.
l
Corresponslingly, the "Racial Contract" demystifies the
uniqueness of -white racism (for those who, understandably,
see Europeans as intrinsically W hite) by locating it as the
contingent outcome of a particular set of circumstances. It is
proper, given both the historical record and the denial of it
until recently, that white racism and white W hiteness should
be the polemical focus of critique. But it is important not to
lose sight of the fact that other subordinate Racial Contracts
exist which do not involve white/nonwhite relations. In a
sense, the "Racial Contract" decolorizes W hiteness by de
taching it from whiteness, thereby demonstrating that in a
parallel universe it could have been Yellowness, Redness,
Brownness, or Blackness. Or, alternatively phrased, we could
have had a yellow, red, brown, or black W hiteness: Whiteness
is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.
That it is, is illustrated by the only serious twentieth
century challenger to European domination: Japan. As I have
mentioned throughout, their unique history has put the Japa
nese in the peculiar position of being, at different times, or
even simultaneously by different systems, nonwhite by the
global W hite Racial Contract, white by the local (Nazi) Racial
Contract, and a (W hite) yelJow by their own Yellow Racial
,
Contract. In Asia the Japanese ' have long considered them-
selves the superior race, oppressing the Ainu in their own
country and proclaiming during the 1 9 3 0S a Pan-Asiatic mis
sion to "unite the yellow races" under their leadership against
white Western domination, The ruthlessness displayed on
1 27
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
I
both sides during the Pacific War, a "war without mercy, "
arose in part because on both sides it was a race war, a war
between conflicting systems of racial superiority, competing
claims to the real Whiteness, pink or yellow. The headline
of one Hearst paper summed it up: "The war in the Pacific is
the World War, the War of Oriental Races against Occidental
Races for the Domination of the World.1I76 As written during
the Japanese occupation of China, from the 1 937 Rape of Nan
king on, the Yellow Racial Contract produced a death toll
estimated by some to be as high as 1 0-13 million people.77
What Axis triumph might have meant for the world is re
vealed in a remarkable document that survived the desperate
burning of files in the last weeks before the arrival in Tokyo
of the occupying U.S. army: An Investigation of Global Policy
with the Yamato Race as Nucleus. Not exactly an equivalent
to the infamous 1 942 Nazi Wannsee Protocol that put the
details of the Final Solution into place, it does nonetheless
describe the "natural hierarchy based on inherent qualities
and capabilities" of the various races of the world, envisages a
global order in which the "Yamato race" would be the "leading
race" (which would have to avoid intermarriage to maintain
its purity), and prescribes a postwar mission of expansion and
colonization based on an ominously revised global cartography
in which, for example, America emerges as "Asia's eastern
wing. "78 The Yamatos and the Aryans would, postvictory, have
had to fight it out to decide who the real global master race
was. So there is no reason to think that other nonwhites (non
yellows? ) would have fared much better under this version of
the Racial Contract. The point, then, is that while the White
Racial Contract has historically been the most devastating
and the most important one in shaping the contours of the
world, it is not unique, and there should be no essentialist
illusions about anyone's intrinsic "racial" virtue. All peoples
1 28
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
can fall into Whiteness under the appropriate circumstances,
as shown by the ( "White") black Hutus' 1 9 94 massacre of half
a million to a million inferior black Tutsis in a few bloody
weeks in Rwanda.
Though it may appear to be such, the "Racial Contract" is
not a "deconstruction" of the social contract . I am in some
sympathy with postmodernism politically-the iconoclastic
challenge to orthodox theory, the tipping over of the white
marble busts in the museum of Great Western Thinkers-but
ultimately, I see it ,as an epistemological and theoretical dead
end, itself symptomatic rather than diagnostic of the problems
of the globe as We enter the new millennium/9 The "Racial
Contract" is really in the spirit of a racially informed Ideo
logiekritik and thus pro-Enlightenment (Jiirgen Habermas's
radical and to-be-completed Enlightenment, that is-though
Habermas's Eurocentric, deraced, and deimperialized vision
of modernity itself stands in need of critique)80 and antipost
modernist. It criticizes the social contract from a normative
base that does not see the ideals of contractarianism them
selves as necessarily problematic but shows how they have
been betrayed by white contractarians. So it assumes inter
translatability, the conceptual commensurability of degraded
norm and critique, and brings them together in an epistemic
union that repudiates the postmodernist picture of isolated,
mutually unintelligible language games. Moreover, it is explic
itly predicated on the truth of a particular metanarrative, the
historical account of the European conquest of the world,
which has made the world what it is today. Thus it lays claims
to truth, objectivity, realism, the description of .the world as
it actually is, the prescription f>r a transformation of that
world to achieve racial justice-and invites criticism on those
same terms.
In the best tradition of oppositional materialist critique of
1 29
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
hegemonic idealist social theory, the "Racial Contract" recog
nizes the actuality of the world we live in, relates the construc
tion of ideals, and the nonrealization of these ideals, to the
character of this world, to group interests and institutionalized
structures, and points to what would be necessary for achiev
ing them . Thus it unites description and prescription, fact
and norm.
Unlike the social contract, which is necessarily embarrassed
by the actual histories of the polities in which it is propagated,
the "Racial Contract" starts from these uncomfortable reali
ties. Thus it is not, like the social contract, continually forced
to retreat into illusory idealizing abstraction, the never-never
land of pure theory, but can move readily between the hypc>
thetical and the actual, the subjunctive and the indicative,
having no need to pretend things happened which did not, to
evade and to elide and to skim over. The "Racial Contract"
is intimate with the world and so is not continually "aston
ished" by revelations about it; it does not find it remarkable
that racism has been the norm and that people think of them
selves as raced rather than abstract citizens, which any objec
tive history will in fact show. The "Racial Contract" is an
abstraction that is this-worldly, showing that the problem with
mainstream political philosophy is not abstraction in itself
(all theory definitionally requires abstraction), but abstraction
that, as Onora O'Neill has pointed out, characteristically ab
stracts away from the things that matter, the actual causal
determinants and their requisite theoretical correlates, guided
by the terms of the Racial Contract which has now written
itself out of existence but continues to affect theory and theo
rizing by its invisible presence.8! The "Racial Contract"
throws open the doors of orthodox political philosophy's her
metically sealed, stuffy little universe and lets the world rush
into its sterile white halls, a world populated not by abstract
1 30
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
citizens but by white, black, brown, yellow, red beings, inter
acting with, pretending not to see, categorizing, judging, nego
tiating, allying, exploiting, struggling with each other in large
measure according to race-the world, in short, in which we
all actually live.
Finally, the "Racial Contract" locates itself proudly in the
long, honorable tradition of oppositional black theory, the
theory of those who were denied the capacity to theorize, the
cognitions of persons rejecting their official subpersonhood.
The peculiar -terms of the slavery contract meant that, of all
the different varieties of subpersons, blacks were the ones
most directly confronted over a period of hundreds of years
with the contradictions of white theory, being both a part
and not a part of the white polity, and as such epistemically
privileged. The "Racial Contract" pays tribute to the insights
of generations of anonymous "race men" (and "race women")
who, under the most difficult circumstances, often self
educated, denied access to formal training and the resources
of the academy, the object of scorn and contempt from hege
monic white theory, nevertheless managed to forge the con
cepts necessary to trace the contours of the system oppressing
them, defying the massive weight of a white scholarship that
either morally justified this oppression or denied its existence.
Black activists have always recognized white domination,
white power (what one writer in 1 9 1 9 called the "white
ocracy, " rule by whites),82 as a political system of exclusion
and differential privilege, problematically conceptualized by
the categories of either white liberalism or white Marxism.
The "Racial Contract" can thus be regarded as a black vernacu
lar (literally: "the language of the slave" ) " Signifyin(g)" on
the social contract, a "double-voiced, " "two-toned, " "formal
revision" that "critique[s] the nature of (white) meaning it
self, " by demonstratin.g that "a Simultaneous, but negated,
1 31
THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS

parallel discursive (ontological, political) universe exists, honestly addressed. Those who pretend not to see them, who

within the larger white discursive universe. "83 It is a black claim not to recognize the picture I have sketched, are only

demystification of the lies of white theory, an uncovering of continuing the epistemology of ignorance required by the origi

the Klan robes beneath the white politician's three-piece suit. nal Racial Contract. As long as this studied ignorance persists,

Ironic, cool, hip, above all knowing, the "Racial Contract" the Racial Contract will only be rewritten, rather than being

speaks from the perspective of the cognizers whose mere pres torn up altogether, and justice will continue to be restricted

ence in the halls of white theory is a cognitive threat, to "just us. "

because-in the inverted epistemic logic of the racial polity

the "ideal speech situation" requires our absence, since we
are, literally, the men and women who know too much, who
in that wonderful American expr e ssion-know where the bod
ies are buried (after all, so many of them are our own). It does
what black critique has always had to do to be effective: it
situates itself in the same space as its adversary and then shows
what follows from "writing 'race' and [seeing] the difference it
makes. "84 As such, it makes it possible for us to connect the
two rather than, as at present, have them isolated in two
ghettoized spaces, black political theory'S ghettoization from
mainstream discussion, white mainstream theory's ghettoiza
tion from reality.
The struggle to close the gap between the ideal of the social
contract and the reality of the Racial Contract has been the
unacknowledged political history of the past few hundred
years, the "battle of the color line, " in the words of W. E. B.
Du Bois, and is likely to continue being so for the near future,
as racial division continues to fester, the United States moves
demographically from a white-majority to a nonwhite
majority society, the chasm between a largely white First
World and a largely nonwhite Third World continues to deepen,
desperate illegal immigration from the latter to the former
escalates, and demands for global justice in a new world order
of "global apartheid" grow louder.85 Naming this reality brings
it into the necessary theoretical focus for these issues to be

132 1 33
NOTES

INTRODUCTION

I. A 1 994 report on American philosophy, "Status and Future of

the Profession, " revealed that "only one department in 20 (28
of the 456 departments reporting) has any [tenure-track] African
American faculty, with slightly fewer having either Hispanic
American or Asian-American [tenure-track] faculty ( I ? depart
ments in both cases). A mere seven departments have any
[tenure-track] Native American faculty. " Proceedings and Ad
dresses of The American Philosophical Association 70, no. 2
( 1 99 6 ) : 1 3 7
2. For an overview, see, for example, Ernest Barker, Introduction
to Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau, ed.
Barker ( 1 947; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 9 60); Mi
chael Lessnoff, Social Contract (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Hu
manities Press, 1 9 86); will Kymlicka, "The Social Contract
Tradition," in A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford:
Blackwell Reference, 1 9 9 1 ), pp. 1 8 6-96; Jean Hampton, "Con
tract and Consent," in A Companion to Contemporary Political
Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (Oxford:
Blackwell Reference, 1 9 9 3 ), pp. 379-9 3 .
3 . Indigenous peoples a s a global group are sometimes referred to
as the "Fourth World." See Roger Moody, ed., The Indigenous
Voice: Visions and Realities, 2d ed., rev. ( 1 988; rpt. Utrecht:
International Books, 1 9 9 3) .

1 35
NOTES TO PAGES 4-6
4 For a praiseworthy exception, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and
the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
I 990). Young focuses explicitly on the implications for standard
conceptions of justice of group subordination, including racial
groups.
S Credit for the revival of social contract theory, and indeed post
war political philosophy in general, is usually given to John
Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, I 97 I ).
6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, I 9 9 I ); John Locke, Two Treatises of
Government, ed. Peter Laslett ( I 960; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, I 988); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on
the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, trans.
Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, I 984); Rousseau, The So
cial Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, I 968);
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I 9 9 I ).
7 In "Contract and Consent," p. 3 82, Jean Hampton reminds us
that for the classic theorists, contract is intended "simultane
ously to describe the nature of political societies, and to prescribe
a new and more defensible form for such societies." In this essay,
and also in "The Contractarian Explanation of the State, " in
The Philosophy of the Human Sciences, Midwest Studies in
Philosophy, I S , ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr., and
Howard K. Wettstein ( Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, I 9 90), pp. 344-7 I, she argues explicitly for a revival
of the old-fashioned, seemingly discredited " contractarian expla
nation of the state." Hampton points out that the imagery of
"contract" captures the essential point that "authoritative po
litical societies are human creations" (not divinely ordained or
naturally determined) and "conventionally generated."
8. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, pt. 2 .
9 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford Uni
versity Press, I 988). One difference between our approaches is
that Pateman thinks contractarianism is necessarily
oppressive-"Contract always generates political .right in the
form of relations of domination and subordination" (p. 8)-
136
NOTES TO PAGES 7-1 1
whereas I see domination within contract theory as more contin
gent. For me, in other words, it is not the case that a Racial
Contract had to underpin the social contract. Rather, this con
tract is a result of the particular conjunction of circumstances
in global history which led to European imperialism. And as a
corollary, I believe contract theory can be put to positive use
once this hidden history is acknowledged, though I do not follow
up such a program in this book. For an example of feminist
contractarianism that contrasts with Pateman's negative assess
ment, see Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family
(New York: Basic .Books, 1989).
ro. See, for example, Paul Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions (Prince
ton: Princeton University Press, I 992), p. 22.
I I . See Hampton, "Contract and Consent" and "Contractarian Ex
planation." Hampton's own focus is the liberal-democratic state,
but obviously her strategy of employing "contract" to conceptu
alize conventionaly generated norms and practices is open to
be adapted to the understanding of the non-liberal-democratic
racial state, the diffetence being that "the people" now become
the white population.
CHAPTER 1 . OVERVIEW
I. Otto Gierke termed these respectively the Gesellschaftsvertrag
and the Herrschaftsvertrag. For a discussion, see, for example,
Barker, Introduction, Social Contract; and Lessnoff, Social Con
tract, chap. 3.
2. Rawls, Theory of Justice, pt. I .
3 . In speaking generally o f "whites," I am not, o f course, denying
that there are gender relations of domination and subordination
or, for that matter, class relations of domination and subordina
tion within the white population. I am not claiming that race
is the only axis of social oppression. But race is what I want to
focus on; so in the absence of that chimerical entity, a unifying
theory of race, class, and gender oppression, it seems to me that
one has to make generalizations that it would be stylistically
cumbersome to qualify at every point. So these should just be
1 37
NOTES TO PAGES 1 2-1 5
taken as read. Nevertheless, I do want to insist that my overall
picture is roughly accurate, i.e., that whites do in general benefit
from white supremacy (though gender and class differentiation
mean, of course, that they do not benefit equally) and that histori
cally white racial solidarity has overridden class and gender
solidarity. Women, subordinate classes, and nonwhites may be
oppressed in common, but it is not a common oppression: the
structuring is so different that it has not led to any common
front between them. Neither white women nor white workers
have as a group (as against principled individuals) historically
made common cause with nonwhites against colonialism, white
settlement, slavery, imperialism, jim crow, apartheid. We all
have multiple identities, and, to this extent, most of us are both
privileged and disadvantaged by different systems of domination.
But white racial identity has generally triumphed over all others;
it is race that (transgender, transclass) has generally determined
the social world and loyalties, the lifeworld, of whites-whether
as citizens of the colonizing mother country, settlers, nonslaves,
or beneficiaries of the "color bar" and the "color line. " There
has been no comparable, spontaneously crystallizing transracial
"workers'" world or transracial "female" world: race is the iden
tity around which whites have usually closed ranks. Neverthe
less, as a concession, a semantic signal of this admitted gender
privileging within the white population, by which white wom
en's personhood is originally virtual, dependent on their having
the appropriate relation (daughter, sister, wife) to the white male,
I will sometimes deliberately use the non-gender;neutral "men. "
For some recent literature on these problematic intersections of
identity, see, for example, Ruth Frankenberg, White Women,
Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapo
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 9 9 3 ); Nupur Chaudhuri and
Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Com
plicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the
Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1 9 9 1 ) .
4 . Rousseau, Social Contract; Hobbes, ieviathan.
5 . For a discussion of the two versions, see Kymlicka, "The Social
Contract Tradition. "
138
NOTES TO PAGES 1 5-1 9
6. Hobbes's judgment that " INJUSTICE, is no other than the not
Performance of Covenant," Leviathan, p. 100, has standardly
been taken as a statement of moral conventionalism. Hobbes's
egalitarian social morality is based not on the moral equality of
humans, but on the fact of a rough parity of physical power and
mental ability in the state of nature (chap. 1 3 ). Within this
framework, the Racial Contract would then be the natural out
come of a systematic disparity in power-of weaponry rather
than individual strength-between expansionist Europe and the
rest of the world. This could be said to be neatly summed up in
Hilaire Belloc's famous little ditty: "Whatever happens, we have
got / The Maxim Gun,- and they have not." Hilaire Belloc, "The
Modern Traveller, " quoted in John Ellis, The Social History of the
Machine Gun ( 1 9 7 5 ; rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Paperbacks,
1 9 86), p. 94. Or at an earlier stage, in the conquest of the Ameri
cas, the musket and the steel sword.
7. See, for example, A. P. d'Entreves, Natural Law: An Introduction
to Legal Philosophy, 2d rev. ed. ( 1 9 5 1 ; rpL London: Hutchin
son, 1 970).
8. Locke, Second Treatise of Two Treatises of Government, p. 269.
9. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 230-3 2.
10. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the
History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 948).
I I . For the notion of "epistemological communities," see recent
work in feminist theory-for example, Linda Alcoff and Eliza
beth Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies (New York:
Routledge, 1 9 9 3 ) .
1 2. Thus Ward Churchill, a Native American, speaks sardonically
of "fantasies of the master race." Ward Churchill, Fantasies of
the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of
American Indians, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Monroe, Maine: Com
mon Courage Press, 1 992); William Gibson, Neuromancer (New
York: Ace Science Fiction Books, 1 984).
1 3 . Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West
(London: Routledge, 1 990); Edward W. Said, Orientalism ( 1 978;
rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1 97 9 ); V. Y. Mutlimbe, The Inven
tion of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 988); Enrique Dussel,
1 39
NOTES TO PAGES 1 9-23
The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "the Other" and the
Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber ( 1 992; rpt. New
York: Continuum, 1 9 9 5 ); Robert Berkhofer Jr., The White Man 's
Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the
Present (New York: Knopf, 1 978); Gretchen M. Bataille and
Charles 1. P. Silet, eds., The Pretend Indians: Images of Native
Americans in the Movies (Ames: Iowa State University Press,
1 9 80); George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White
Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny,
I817-I914 (1 9 7 1 ; rpt. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1 987); Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Caliban and Other
Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minne
sota Press, 1 9 89); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe
and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (1986; rpt. London:
Routledge, 1 992).
14. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property,
and the State (New York: International, 1 9 72), p. 120.
1 5 . Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth, trans. Constance Farrington ( 1 9 6 1; rpt. New York: Grove
Weidenfeld, 1 99 1 ).
1 6 . V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow
Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire (1969; rpt. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986); Anthony Pagden, Lords of
All the World: Ideologies ofEmpire in Spain, Britain, and France,
c. ISOO-C. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 9 9 5 ).
17. Pagden, Lords, pp. 1-2.
18. Robert A. Williams Jr., "The Algebra of Federal Indian Law: The
Hard Trail of Decolonizing and Americanizing the White Man's
Indian Jurisprudence," Wisconsin Law Review 1986 ( 1 9 86): 229.
See also Robert A. Williams Jr., The American Indian in Western
Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1 990).
19. Williams, "Algebra," pp. 230-3 1, 2 3 3 . See also Lewis Hanke,
Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice
in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1 9 5 9), p. 1 9
2 0 . Williams, "Algebra"; Hanke, Aristotle.
2 I . Allen Carey-Webb, "Other-Fashioning: The Discourse of Empire
1 40
NOTES TO PAGES 23-28
and Nation in Lope de Vega's El Nuevo mundo descubierto par
Cristobal Colon, " in Amerindian Images and the Legacy of
Columbus, ed. Rene Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini, Hispanic Is
sues, 9 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 992),
PP 43 3-34
22. Philip D. Curtin, Introduction, to Imperialism, ed. Curti:Q. (New
York: Walker, 1 9 7 1 ), p. xiii.
2 3 . Pierre 1. van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative
Perspective, 2d ed. (New York: Wiley, 1 978).
24. Pagden, Lords, chap. I .
2 5 . Williams, "Algebra," p . 2 5 3
r
26.- ustice Joseph Story, quoted i n Williams, "Algebra, " p. 2 5 6 .
2 7 . Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1 857, in Race, Class, and Gender in the
United States: An Integrated Study, ed. Paula S. Rothenberg, 3d
ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1 9 9 5 ), p. 323
28. Excerpt from Jules Harmand, Domination et colonisation (19 I 0),
in Curtin, Imperialism, pp. 294-98.
29. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf,
1 9 9 3 ), pp. xiv, xiii.
30. Harold R. Isaacs, "Color in World Affairs," Foreign Affairs 47
( 1 969): 2 3 5 , 246. See also Benjamin P. Bowser, ed., Racism and
Anti-Racism in World Perspective (Thousand Oaks, Calif:
Sage, 1 9 9 5 ) .
3 I . Helen Jackson, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United
States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes
( 1 8 8 1; rpt. New York: Indian Head Books, 1 9 9 3 ) In her classic
expose, Jackson concludes (pp. 3 37-3 8): "It makes little differ
ence . . . where one opens the record of the history of the Indians;
every page and every year has its dark stain. The story of one
tribe is the story of all, varied only by differences of time and
place . . . . [T]he United States Government breaks promises now
[ 1 880] as deftly as then [ 1 7 9 5 ], and with an added ingenuity from
long practice." Jackson herself, it should be noted, saw Native
Americans as having a "lesser right," since there was no question
about the "fairness of holding that ultimate sovereignty belonged
to the civilized discoverer, 'as against the savage barbarian." To
think otherwise would merely be "feeble sentimentalism"
(pp. IO-I I ) . But she did at least want this leser right recognized.
1 41

NOTES TO PAGE 28
32. See, for example, David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Co
lumbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
33. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian
Hating and Empire-Building (New York: Meridian, 1 980), p. 332.
34. Ibid., p. 1 02. See also Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest
Destiny: The Origins ofAmerican RacialAnglo-Saxonism (Cam
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1 9 8 I ); and Ronald Takaki, Iron
Cages: Race and Culture in I9th-Century America ( 1 979; rpt.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1 990).
3 5 . A. Grenfell Price, White Settlers and Native Peoples: An Histori
cal Study of Racial Contacts between English-Speaking Whites
and Aboriginal Peoples in the United States, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand ( 1 9 5 0; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1 9 7 2); A. Grenfell Price, The Western Invasions of the Pacific
and Its Continents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1 9 6 3 ); van den
Berghe, Race; Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Stud
ies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South
Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World, 1 9 6 4); F. S. Stevens, ed., Racism: The Australian Experi
ence, 3 vols. (New York: Taplinger, 1 972); Henry Reynolds, The
Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the Euro
pean Invasion of Australia (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pen
guin, 1 9 82). Price's books are valuable sources in comparative
history, but-though progressive by the standards of the time
they need to be treated with caution, since their figures and
attitudes are both now somewhat dated. In White Settlers, for
example, the Indian population north of the Rio Grande is esti
mated at fewer than 8 5 0,000, whereas estimates today are ten
to twenty times higher, and Price speculates that the Indians
were "less advanced than their white conquerors" because they
had smaller brains (pp. 6-7).
3 6. Van den Berghe, Race, p. 18.
3 7 . C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Tim Crow, 3 d ed.
( 1 9 5 5; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1 974); George
M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in
American and South African History (New York: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 1 9 8 1 ); Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton,
1 42
NOTES TO PAGES 29-33
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Under
class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 99 3 )
38. See, for example, Kiernan, Lords; V. G . Kiernan, Imperalism and
its Contradictions, ed. Harvey J. Kaye (New York: Routledge,
1 9 9 5 ); D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative
Survey from the Eighteenth Century ( 1 9 66; rpt. London: Macmil
lan, 1 982); Pagden, Lords; Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of
Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite (New
York: Vintage Books, 1 9 7 5 ); Henri Brunschwig, French Colonial
ism, 1 8 7 1-1914: Myths and Realities, trans. William Granville
Brown ( 1 96 4; rpt. New York: Praeger, 1 9 66); David Healy, U. S.
Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the I 890S (Madison: Uni
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1 970).
39. Said, Culture, p. 8.
40. Kiernan, Lords, p. 24
4 1 . Linda Alcoff outlines an attractive, distinctively Latin American
ideal of hybrid racial identity in her "Mestizo Identity, " in
American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity, ed. Naomi
Zack (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1 9 9 5 ), pp. 2 5 7-78.
Unfortunately, however, this ideal has yet to be realized. For an
exposure of the Latin American myths of "racial democracy"
and a race-transcendent mestizaje, and an account of the reality
of the ideal of blanqueamiento (whitening) and the continuing
subordination of blacks and the darker-skinned throughout the
region, see, for example, Minority Rights Group, ed., No Longer
Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans Today (London: Minority
Rights, 1 9 9 5 ); and Bowser, Racism and Anti-Racism.
42. Locke, Second Treatise, pp. 3 5 0-5 1 . Since Locke also uses "prop
erty" to mean rights, this is not quite as one-dimensional a
vision of government as it sounds.
43. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 89
44. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1 860-1880
(1 9 3 5 ; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1992).
45. See Eric Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1 9 8 1 ) . My discussion here follows J. M. Blaut
et al., 1492: The Debate on Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and
History (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1 992); and J. M. Blaut,
1 43
NOTES TO PAGES 34-39
The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism
and EUIocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1 9 9 3 ).
46. Blaut, I492; Blaut, Colonizer's Model.
47 Sandra Harding, Introduction, to Harding, ed., The "Racial"
Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1 9 9 3 ), p. 2.
48. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery ( 1 944; rpt. New York:
Capricorn Books, 1 966).
49 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa ( 1 972; rpt.
Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1 974); Samir Amin,
Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore ( 1 988: rpt. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1 989); Andre Gunder Frank, World Accu
mulation, I492-1 789 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978);
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 vols. (New
York: Academic Press, 1 974-1 988).
50. Blaut, I492, p. 3.
5 1 . Kiernan, Imperialism, pp. 98, 1 49.
5 2 . Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Year 50I: The Conquest Continues
(Boston: South End Press, 1 99 3 ), p. 6 1 .
5 3 But see Richard J . Herrnstein and Charles Murray's bestseller
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American
Life (New York: Free Press, 1 994), as a sign that the older,
straightforwardly racist theories may be making a comeback.
54 See, for example: Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and
White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Scribner's, 1 992);
Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence
of Racism (New York: BasicBooks, 1 992); Massey and Denton,
American Apartheid; Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Re
treat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Bos
ton: Beacon Press, 1 9 9 5 ); Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders,
Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chi
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1 99 6 ); Tom Wicker, Tragic
FailUIe: Racial Integration in America (New, York: William Mor
row, 1 996).
5 5 Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White
Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York:
Routledge 1995 ), pp. 86, 7.
5 6 . Richard F. America, ed., The Wealth of Races: The Present Value
1 44
NOTES TO PAGES 39-45
of Benefits from Past Injustices (New York: Greenwood Press,
1 990). For another ironic tribute, whose subject is the interna
tional distribution of wealth, see Malcolm Caldwell, The Wealth
of Some Nations (London: Zed Press, 1977).
5 7 . David H. Swinton, "Racial Inequality and Reparations," in
America, Wealth of Races, p. 1 5 6.
58. James Marketti, "Estimated Present Value of Income Diverted
during Slavery, " in America, Wealth of Races, p. 1 07.
59. Robert S. Browne, "Achieving Parity through Reparations, " in
America, Wealth of Races, p. 204; Swinton, "Racial Inequal
ity, " p. 1 5 6.
CHAPTER 2. DETAILS
I.I will later discuss the taxonomic problems posed by "border
line" I"semi-" Europeans.
2. See, for example, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Im
ages of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture ( 1 990; rpt.
New Haven: Yale Univrsity Press, 1 992), pp. 30-3 1; Ronald
Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of Ameri
can Racism (Boston: Little, .Brown, 1 978), p. 202.
3. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak, eds., The Wild Man
Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to
Romanticism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972).
4. Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an
Idea, " in Dudley and Novak, Wild Man, p. 5 .
5. Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the
Indian and the American Mind, rev. ed. ( 1 9 5 3; rpt. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1 9 6 5 ) (original title: The Savages of
America), p. 3 .
6 . Mary Louise Pratt, " Humboldt and the Reinvention of America, "
in Jara and Spadaccini, Amerindian Images, p. 5 89.
7. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, pp. 15, 1 3 .
8. Martin Bernal, The Fabric ation of Ancient Greece, 17 85-I985,
vol. I of Black Athena.]he Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civili
zation (New Brunswick,' N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1 9 87).
This claim has a long history in the international black commu-
1 45
NOTES TO PAGES 45-50
nity (African, African Americanl. See, for example, Cheikh Anta
Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans.
Mercer Cook ( 1 9 5 5 , 1967; rpt. Westport, Conn.: .Lawrence
Hill, 1 9741
9. Harding, "Racial" Economy, p. 27.
10. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul O'Prey ( 1 902; rpt.
London: Penguin Books, 1 9 8 3 1, p. 3 3 .
11. Scott B . Cook, Colonial Encounters in the Age of High Imperial
ism (New York: HarperCollins World History Series, 1 9961,
p. I 04
12. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, p. 7 1 .
13. Sanders, Lost Tribes, pp. 9-12.
14. Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 122-23, lOS, 66.
IS. For an analysis of the film, see, for example, Michael Ryan and
Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana Univer
sity Press, 1 9 8 8 1.
16. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Poli
tics of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass. : Blackwell, 1 9 9 3 1, p. 1 8 5 , and
more generally, chap. 8, " 'Polluting the Body Politic': Race and
Urban Location," pp. 1 8 5 -205 .
17. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, pp. 3 8-40.
18. Franke Wilmer, The Indigenous Voice in World Politics: Since
Time Immemorial (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1 99 3 1.
19. Locke, Second Treatise, p. 3 0 1 .
20. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonial
ism, and the Cant of Conquest ( 1 97 5 ; rpt. NeW York: Norton,
1 97 6 1, pt. 1 .
21. Ibid, p . 1 6 . See also Stannard, American Holocaust, chaps. I and
2, for an account of the exponential upward revision in recent
years of estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Ameri
cas and the politics of its previous undercounting. Half a century
ago, standard figures were 8 million total for North and South
America and fewer than I million for the region north of Mexico;
today some estimates would put these numbers as high as 145
million and 1 8 million, respectively. Stannard, American Holo
caust, p. I I .
22. Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 49, 2 1 2, 232.
1 46
NOTES TO PAGES 50-56
2 3 . Quoted from an official document by A. Barrie Pittock, "Aborigi
nal Land Rights," in Stevens, Racism 2 : 1 92.
24. Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology ofApartheid (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1 98 5 1, p. 7 5 .
2 5 . Drinnon, FaCing West, p . 2 1 3 .
2 6 . Russel Ward, "An Australian Legend, " Royal Australian Histori
cal Society Journal and Proceedings 47, no. 6 ( 1 9 6 1 1: 344, quoted
by M. C. Hartwig, "Aborigines and Racism: An Historical Per
spective, " in Stevens, Racism 2:9.
27. For a classic analysis, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
trans. Charles Lam Markmann ( 1 9 5 2; rpt. New York: Grove
Weidenfeld, 1 9 6 8 Ii and for a recent exploration, Lewis R. Gordon,
Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Hu
manities Press, 1 9 9 5 1, esp. chaps. 7, 1 4, and I S , pp. 29-44.
97-I03, 1 04-16.
28. Gordon, B a d Faith pp. 99, 1 0 5 .
2 9 . Frankenberg, White Women, chap. 3 .
3 0 . Fanon, Black Skin; Charles Herbert Stember, Sexual Racism:
The Emotional Barrier to an Integrated Society (New York:
Elsevier, 1 9761; Johv. D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate
Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper
and Row, 1 9 8 8 1, chap. 5 , "Race and Sexuality, " pp. 8 5-108.
3 1 . Susan Mendus, "Kant: 'An .}Ionest but Narrow-Minded Bour
geois' ? " in Women in Western Political Philosophy, ed. Ellen
Kennedy and Susan Mendus (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1 9 8 7 1, pp. 2 1-43
3 2 . Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A . Sinclair ( 1 962; rev. ed.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1 9 8 1 ), pp. 63-7 3 .
3 3 . White, "Forms of Wildness," p . 1 7 .
3 4 . Jennings, Invasion of America, p. 6 .
3 5 . See Cornel West's description o f the emergence in the modern
period of the "normative gaze" of white supremacy: "A Geneal
ogy of Modern Racism," chap. 2 of Prophesy Deliverance!: An
Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Phildelphia: West
minster Press, 1 982), pp. 47-6 5 .
3 6 . M. 1. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York:
Viking Press, 1 9 80), p. 1 44.
37. Lucius Outlaw Jr., "Life-Worlds, Modernity, and Philosophical
1 47
NOTES TO PAGES 57-64
Praxis: Race, Ethnicity, and Critical Social Theory, " in Outlaw,
On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 1 6 5 .
38. Quoted in Drinnon, Facing West, p . 7 5 .
39. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 5 2 , 5 9 .
40. Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture,
vol. I of Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 1 9 9 1 ) .
41. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 992).
42. Quoted in Pearce, Savagism, pp. 7-8.
43. For a discussion, see, for example, Stephen Tay Gould, The Mis
measure of Man (New York and London: Norton, 1 9 8 1 ); and
William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1 994). Tucker asserts flatly
(p. 5 ): "The truth is that though waged with scientific weapons,
the goal in this controversy has always been political."
44. Harmannus Hoetink, Caribbean Race Relations: A Study of
Two Variants, trans. Eva M. Hooykaas ( 1 962; rpt. London: Oxford
University Press, 1967).
45. George 1. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of Euro
pean Racism ( 1 978; rpt. Madison: Univer,sity of Wisconsin Press,
1 9 8 5 ), Pp. xii, I I .
46. Winthrop D. Tordan, White over Black: American Attitudes to
ward the Negro, I S 50-I 8I2 (1968; rpt. New York: Norton, 1977).
47. Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind
( 1 7 5 1 ), quoted in Tordan, White over Black, pp. 270, 1 4 3 .
48. See, for example, Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall,
The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African
Americans (New York: Harcourt Brace Tovanovich, 1 992).
49. Frank M. Snowden Tr., Blacks in Antiquity.' Ethiopians in the
Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1 9 70); Frank M. Snowden Tr., Before Color Prejudice: The
Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1 9 8 3 ) .
5 0 . Theodore W. Allen, Racial Oppression and Social Control, vol.
I of The Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1 994);
Ian F. Haney L6pez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of
Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
5 I . Tennings, Invasion of America, p. 60.
1 48
N OTES TO PAGES 64-68
5 2 . Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace, trans. Francis W.
Kelsey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1 92 5 ), chap. 20, "On Punish
ments," of bk. 2, p. 5 06, quoted in Williams, "Algebra," p. 2 5 0.
5 3 . For the following, compare Tames Tully, Strange Multiplicity:
Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1 9 9 5 ), esp. chap. 3, "The Historical
Formation of Modern Constitutionalism: The Empire of Unifor
mity, " pp. 5 8-98. I thank Anthony Laden for bringing this book
to my attention, which I only learned about when my own
manuscript was on the verge of completion.
54. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 89
5 5 . Richard Ashcraft, "Leviathan Triumphant: Thomas Hobbes and
the Politics of Wild Men, " in Dudley and Novak, Wild Man,
PP 146-47.
5 6. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 89-90.
5 7 . Two hundred years later, by contrast, the British colonial enter
prise, with the accompanying ontological dichotomization, was
so well entrenched that Tohn Stuart Mill experienced not the
g
slightest qualm in assertin (in an essay now seen as a classic
humanist defense of individualism and freedom) that the liberal
harm principle "is meant to apply only to human beings in the
maturity of their faculties," not to those "backward states of
society in which the race itself may be considered as in its
nonage" : "Despotism is ' a legitimate mode of government in
dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improve
ment. " Tohn Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed.
Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1 989), p. 1 3
5 8 . Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 5 , "Of Property. "
5 9 . Robert A. Williams Tr., "Documents of Barbarism: The Contem
porary Legacy of European Racism and Colonialism in the Narra
tive Traditions of Federal Indian Law, " Arizona Law Review 2 3 7
( 1 989), excerpted in Critical Race Theory.' The Cutting Edge, ed.
Richard Delgado . (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1 9 9 5 ), p. 103.
60. Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 1 6, "On Conquest. "
6 1 . See, for example, 'Tennifer Welchman, "Locke on Slavery and
149
NOTES TO PAGES 68-76
Inalienable Rights, " Canadian Journal of Philosophy 25
( 1 9 9 5 ) : 67-8 1 .
62. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, pp. 8 3 , 87, 90, 1 3 6, 1 40, 145
(nonwhite savages), 140 (European savages).
63. Ibid., p. I I 6 .
64. Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. I, chap. 8 .
65. Emmanuel Eze, "The Color of Reason: The Idea of 'Race' in
Kant's Anthropology, " in Anthropology and the German En
lightenment, ed. Katherine Faull (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Uni
versity Press, 1 9 9 5 ), pp. 1 96-2 3 7 .
66. Eze cites the 1 9 5 0 judgment of Earl Count that scholars often
forget that "Immanuel Kant produced the most profound racio
logical thought of the eighteenth century. " Earl W. Count, ed.,
This Is Race: An Anthology Selected from the International
Literature on the Races of Man (New York: Henry Schuman,
1 9 5 0 ) , p. 704, quoted in Eze, "Color of Reason, " p. 1 9 6 . Compare
the 1 9 6 7 verdict of the German anthropologist Wilhelm Muhl
mann that Kant is "the founder of the modern concept of race, "
quoted in Leon Poliakov, "Racism from the Enlightenment to
the Age of Imperialism," in Racism and Colonialism, ed. Robert
Ross (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1 9 8 2 ), p. 5 9.
67. Mosse, Final Solution, pp. 30-3 I .
68. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful
and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1960 ), pp. I I I- I 3 .
69. Eze, "Color of Reason, " pp. 2 1 4- 1 5 , 209-15, 2 1 7 .
70. See David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the
Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, 1 9 9 1 ) .
71. Janet L Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World
System, A.D. 1 2 5 0-1 3 5 0 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1 989 ) .
72. Fredric Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism, " in National
ism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minneapo
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 990 ), pp. 50-5 1 .
73. Steinberg, Turning Back, p . 1 5 2 .
74. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, pp. 84, 97-98.
75. Morrison, Playing, p. 46.
76. See the discussion of "idealizing" abstractions in Onora O'Neill,
1 50
NOTES TO PAGES 77-85
"Justice, Gender, and International Boundaries, " in The Quality
of Life, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993 ), pp. 303-2 3 .
7 7 . Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of R a c e and Rights (Cam
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1 9 9 1 ), pp. I I 6, 49
78. Bill E. Lawson, "Moral Discourse and Slavery, " in Howard
McGary and Bill E. Lawson, Between Slavery and Freedom:
Philosophy and American Slavery (Bloomington: Indiana Uni
versity Press, 1 992 ), pp. 7 1-89.
79. Anita L. Allen, "Legal Rights for Poor Blacks," in The Underc1ass
Question, ed. Bill E. Lawson (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1992 ), pp. 1 17-3 9
80. Rawls, Theory of Justice; Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and
Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1 974 )
8 1 . Isaacs, "Color, " p. 2 3 5
8 2 . Earl Miner, "The Wild Man through the Looking Glass," in
Dudley and Novak, Wild Man, pp. 89-90.
83. Jordan, White over Black, p. 254
84. Drinnon, Facing West, p. xvii. But see Allen, Invention of the
White Race, for the contrasting position that the Irish were
indeed made nonwhite.
8 5 . Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York:
Routledge, 1995 )
86. See John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the
Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1 9 8 6 ) .
87. Gary Y. Okihiro, "Is Yellow Black or White? " in Margins and
Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1994 ), pp. 3 1-63.
88. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P.
Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 9 9 1 ) .
89. Again, it could be argued that a better formulation is to say that
actually, by the terms of the Racial Contract, they are not the
same crime, that the identity conditions change with the perpe
trator, so that there is really no inconsistency. The judgment of
inconsistency presupposes the background of the social contract.
90. According to the NAAcp Legal Defense and Educational Fund in
New York, of the 380 people executed since the reinstatement of
1 51
NOTES TO PAGES 86-94
capital punishment, only 5 were whites convicted of killing
blacks.
9 I. William Brandon, The American Heritage Book of Indians (New
York: Dell, 1964), p. 327, quoted in Jan P. Nederveen Pieterse,
Empire and Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World
Scale (New York: Praeger, 1 9 8 9 ), p. 3 1 3 .
92. Kiernan, Lords, pp. 198, 47.
93 Locke, Second Treatise, p. 274.
94 Ralph Gi=burg, ed., roo Years of Lynchings ( 1 9 62; rpt. Balti
more: Black Classic Press, 1 9 8 8 ) .
9 S C. J. Dashwood, quoted in Price, White Settlers, p. l I 4. One
white settler, "in revenge for having been speared, had shot on
sight 37 natives." Ibid., p. l I S .
9 6 . Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
an American Slave (New York: Viking Penguin, 1 982), p. 1 3 S .
9 7 Carter G . Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro ( 1 93 3 ; rpt.
Nashville, Tenn.: Winston-Derek, 1 990).
98. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Na
tive Son ( 1 96 1 ; rpt. New York: Vintage International, 1 9 9 3 ), p. 9 6 .
99 Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation, p. 3 1 7.
1 00. Quoted from Survival International Review 4, no. 2 ( 1 979), in
Moody, Indigenous Voice, p. 248.
r o I . Jerry Gambill, "Twenty-one Ways to 'Scalp' an Indian, " 1 9 6 8
speech, in Moody, Indigenous Voice, pp. 293-9 5 , quoted from
Akwesasne Notes I, no. 7 ( 1 979).
1 02. Fanon, Black Skin.
103 Blackisms, quoted from Mureena, Aboriginal Student News
paper, 2, no. 2 ( 1 972), in Moody, Indigenous Voice, pp. 290-92.
1 04 Ngiigi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Lan
guage in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1 9 8 6 ),
pp. 3, 1 2 .
CHAPTER 3. "NATURALIZED" MERITS
I. Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought ( 1 979;
rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 992).
1 52
NOTES TO PAGES 94-95
2. For Hume, see the 1 7 5 3-S 4 edition of his essay, "Of National
Characters, " quoted, for example, in Jordan, White over Black,
p. 2 5 3 ; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to The
Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (New York: Dover,
1 9 5 6 ), pp. 9 1-99. For a detailed critique of Locke and Mill in
particular, and their "colonial liberalism," see Bhikhu Parekh,
"Decolonizing Liberalism, " in The End of "Isms " l Reflections
on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism's Collapse,
ed. Aleksandras Shtromas (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1 9 94),
pp. 8 S -1 03; and Bhikhu Parekh, "Liberalism and Colonialism:
A Critique of Locke and Mill," in The Decolonization of Imagi
nation: Culture, Knowledge and Power, ed. Jan P. Nederveen
Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (London: Zed Books, 1 9 9 5 ),
pp. 8 1-98.
3 . To be fair to Mill, he does have a famous exchange with Thomas
Carlyle on the treatment of blacks in the British West Indies,
in which he comes out for "progressive" (relatively, of course)
social policies. See Thomas Carlyle: The Nigger Question; John
Stuart Mill: The Negro Question, ed. Eugene R. August (New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Crofts Classics, 1 9 7 1 ) . But the
difference is basically between less and more humane colonial
policies; colonialism itself as a politico-economic system of ex
ploitation is not being challenged.
4. Alvin 1. Goldman, "Ethics and Cognitive Science, " Ethics 103
( 1 9 9 3 ): 3 37-60. For further reading on the developing dialogue
between the two, see Mind and Morals: Essays on Ethics and
Cognitive Science, ed. Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, and Andy
Clark (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1 9 9 6 ) .
S . Cf. Frankenberg, White Women, who distinguishes between the
older discourse of essentialist racism, "with its emphasis on
race difference understood in hierarchical terms of essential,
biological inequality," and the current discourse of essential
"sameness," "color-blindness," "a color-evasive and power
evasive" language that asserts that "we are all the same under
the skin," which in ignoring the "structural and institutional
dimensions of racism" implies that "materially, we have the
same chances in U.S. society, " so that "any failure to achieve
is therefore the fault of people of color themselves" (pp. 1 4, 1 39).
1 53
 NOTES TO PAGES 95-97
NOTES TO PAGES 98-99

6. For example, Donald Kinder and Lynn Sander

s conclude in their 1 9 6 8 ), p. 2 5 , quoted in Hartwig, "Aborigines and Racism" in
analysis of American attitudes on race that on many Stevens, Racism 2:ro.
issues of
public policy, " [individual] self-interest turns out Gordon, Bad Faith, pp. 8, 7 5 , 87.
to be quite 15.
unimportant ." What matter are group interests, "intere 16. David Stannard, American Holocaust. The standard response to
sts that
are collective rather than personal, " involving percep this accusation is to claim that the vast majority of Native
tions of
deprivation as relative, "based less in objective condit Americans were actually killed by disease rather than warfare or
ion and
more in social comparison, " i.e., the notion of "group general mistreatment. Stannard replies that: no factual evidence
relative
disadvantage ." And races, it turns out, are the most has been presented to back up this standard claim, and even if
important
social group, since race "creates divisions more notabl it were true, culpability would still remain, along the same lines
e than
any other in American life" : "Insofar as interests figure that we hold the Nazis morally responsible for Jewish deaths
promi
nently in white opinion on race, it is through the threat from disease, malnutrition, and overwork in the ghettos and the
s blacks
appear to pose to whites' collective well-being, not their camps. It is estimated by some scholars that more than two
personal
welfare. " Divided by Color, pp. 262-64, 2 5 2, 8 5 . million Jews actually died from these causes rather than from
7 Susan V. Opotow, ed., "Moral Exclusion and Injusti gassing or shooting. See, for example, Raul Hilberg, The Destruc
ce, " TournaI
of Social Issues, 46, special issue ( 1 990): I, quoted tion of the European Tews, rev. and definitive ed., 3 vols. (New
in Wilmer,
Indigenous Voice. York: Holmes and Meier, 1 9 8 5 ); and Arno Mayer, Why Did the
8. See, for a discussion, Cheryl 1. Harris, "Whiteness Heavens Not Darken! The "Final Solution " in History, with a
as Property, "
Harvard Law Review ro6 ( 1 99 3 ): 1 7 09-9 1 ; and new foreword ( 1 9 88; rpt. New York: Pantheon, 1 990). Nonethe
Welchman,
"Locke on Slavery. " less we do of course-as' we should-assign blame for these
'
9 Consider the "racial etiquette" of the Old South,
deaths to azi policy, as ultimately causally responsible. For
as documented
in John Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town, rival positions in this often angry debate, see David E. Stannard,
3d ed.
( 1 937; rpt. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1 9 5
"Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship"
7 ), and explored,
(where these points are made and these sources cited), and Steven
say, in William Faulkner's novels and Richard Wrigh
t, "The T. Katz, "The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Di
Ethics of Living Jim Crow" ( 1 9 37 ), in Bearing Witnes
s: Selections mension," both in Is the Holocaust Unique! Perspectives on
from African-American Autobiography in the
Twentieth Cen Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, Colo.:
tury, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Panthe
on Books, Westview Press, 1 9 9 6 ): 1 6 3-208 and 1 9-3 8. See also Tzvetan
1 9 9 1 ), pp. 39-5 1 .
Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other,
r o. Kiernan cites the view held by many whites about
slavery that trans. Richard Howard ( 1 982; rpt. New York: Harper and Row,
"Negroes have far duller nerves and are less susceptible
to pain 1984), esp. chap. 3, "Love, " pp. 1 27-82.
than Europeans. " Lords, p. 199.
17. Drinnon, Facing West, p. 1 9 9
I I . Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man ( 1 9 5 2; rpt.
New York: Vintage 18. See Stannard, American Holocaust, pp. 3 1 7-1 8 .
Books, 1 972), pp. 3, 14.
19. E. D . Morel, The Black Man's Burden ( 1 920; rpt. New York:
1 2 . Baldwin, Nobody Knows, p. 1 72; James Baldwi
n, The Fire Next Monthly Review Press, 1 9 6 9 ). The same estimate is given by
Time ( 1 9 63; rpt. New York: Vintage Intern
ational, 1 9 9 3 ), Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at
PP 5 3-54 the University of Wisconsin.
1 3 Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 1 3 8-39 .
20. Stannard, American Holocaust, p. 1 2 1 . Jonathan Swift in Gulli
14 W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming ( Sydney
: Boyer Lectures, ver's Travels ( 1 ]26) has his protagonist make shoes and a canoe

1 54 1 55
NOTES TO PAGES 99-1 01
out of the skins of the subhuman/human Yahoos of part 4 (them
selves based on the "Hottentots," the Khoi-khoi people of South
Africa). The sail of the canoe was "likewise composed of the
Skins of the same Animal; but I made use of the youngest I
could get, the older being too tough and thick. " Jonathan Swift,
Gulliver's Travels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 9 7 7 ),
P 284.
21. Clive TUInbull, "Tasmania: The Ultimate Solution," in Stevens,
Racism 2:228-34.
22. Dower, War without Mercy, chap. 3, "War Hates and War
Crimes, " pp. 3 3-7 3 .
2 3 . C. 1 . R . James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and
the San Domingo Revolution, 2d ed. ( 1 9 3 8; rpt. New York: Vin
tage Books, 1 9 6 3 ), pp. 1 2-1 3 .
2 4 . Ida Wells-Barnett, O n Lynchings (New York: Arno Press, 1 9 6 9 );
GinzbUIg, roo Years.
2 5 . Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and Euro
pean Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1 9 8 1 ), pp. 1 02-3 . The bullet was so named
because it was manufactured at a British factory at Dum-Dum,
outside Calcutta.
26. Sven Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes, " trans. Joan Tate
( 1 992; rpt. New York: New Press, 1 99 6 ), pp. 3 6-69; and see also
Ellis, Machine Gun, chap. 4, "Making the Map Red," pp. 79-109.
Lindqvist points out (p. 46) that an additional sixteen thousand
Sudanese were wounded in the "battle," and few or none of them
survived either; being summarily executed in its' aftermath.
2 7 . Dower, War without Mercy, pp. 37-3 8.
2 8 . Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews; Ian Hancock, "Re
sponses to the Porrajmos: The Romani Holocaust, " in Rosen
baum, Holocaust, pp. 3 9-64; Christopher Simpson, Blowback:
America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War
(New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1 9 8 8 ), chap. 2, " Slaughter
on the Eastern Front, " pp. 12-2 6 .
29. Quoted in Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai
(New York: Penguin, 1 992), p. 3 3 6. One popular Saigon graffito
of the time was "Kill a Gook for Calley," and telegrams to the
White House ran a hundred to one in his favor. There was also
1 56
NOTES TO PAGES 1 02-106
a hit song in his honor: "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley." Four
Hours, pp. 3 3 8-40. For Algeria, see Fanon, Wretched of the Earth;
and Rita Maran, Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French
Algerian War (New York: Praeger, 1 9 8 9 ). Maran's conclusion is
that the widespread use of tortUIe by the French troops (in viola
tion of French law) was made possible by the mission civilisa
trice, since, after all, Western civilization was at stake. In
Vietnam, by contrast, American troops committing atrocities
simply appealed to the well-established moral principle of the
M.G.R.-the "mere gook rule." See Drinnon, Facing West,
PP 4 5 4-5 9
30. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens! pp. 1 5 - 1 6 . Mayer is reporting
rather than endorsing this view, since his own account seeks to
locate the "Judeocide" in the context of Hitler's anticommunism
and the extreme violence in EUIope dUIing and after the Great
War. His explanation is a pUIely internalist one, jumping three
centUIies from the Thirty Years' War ( 1 6 1 8-48) to the aftermath
of the Great War, with no attention paid to the racial violence
inflicted by Europe on non-EUIope in the interim. But in our
own centUIY, just before World War I, there were the examples
of the Belgian-made holocaut in the Congo and the Germans'
own genocide of the Hereros after the 1 904 uprising.
3 I . Simpson, Blowback, p. 5
32. Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham
( 1 9 5 5; rpt. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1 972), p. 14
3 3 . Kiernan, Imperialism, p. 1 0 1 .
3 4 . Robert Harris, Fatherland ( 1 992; rpt. New York: Harper Paper
backs, 1 9 9 3 ) .
3 5 . Bartolome de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief
Account, trans. Herma Briffault (New York: Seabury Press,
1 974).
36. Stannard, American Holocaust; Bruni Hofer, Heinz Dieterich,
and Klaus Meyer, eds., Das Fiinfhundert-iiihrige Reich (Medico
International, 1990); Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes, "
pp. 1 60, 172.
37. Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel
Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 1 9 9 5 ), p. 9 3
3 8 . Adolf Hitler, 1932 speech, in The Years I 9 3 2 t o I934, vol. I of
1 57

NOTES TO PAGES 1 07-1 1 3
Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, r93 2-r945, ed. Max Do
(
marus, trans. Mary Fran Gilbert 1 9 62; rpt. Wauconda, Ill.:
)
Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990 , p. 9 6 . For this reference, I am indebted
to Finkelstein, Image and Reality, pp. 9 3 -94. Finkelstein points
out that many of Hitler's biographers emphasize how frequently
he invoked as a praiseworthy model to be emulated the success
ful North American extermination of the "red savages. "
3 9 Locke, Second Treatise, pp. 346-49.
(
40. David Hume, "Of the Original Contract" 1 748 , anthologized, ) rick Brantlinger, " 'Dying Races': Rationalizing Genocide in the
e.g., in Barker, Social Contract, pp. 1 47-66.
4 1 . There is now an American journal with the title Race Traitor:
A TournaI of the New Abolitionism. For a collection of articles
from it, see Race Traitor, ed. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey
(New York: Routledge, 1996 . ) 52. Quoted i n Cook, Colonial Encounters, p. 1 .
42. Maran, Torture, p. 1 2 5 n. 30.
43 The slogan of Race Traitor.
44 Quoted in Drinnon, Facing West, p. I 6 3 from the nineteenth
century American novelist Robert Montgomery Bird.
4 5 Chomsky, Year SOl, p. 3 1 .
46. Roger Moody, Introduction (to the first edition), Indigenous
Voice, p. xxix.
47 Bilton and Sim, Four Hours, pp. 1 3 5 -4 1 , 1 76-77, 204-5 .
(
48. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 1 903; rpt. New York:
New American Library, 1 9 8 2 . ) out that Stoddard's book turns up in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great
49 Sitting Bull, quoted in Moody, Indigenous Voice, p. 3 5 5; Church
ill, Fantasies; David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of
the World (Baltimore, Md.: Black Classic Press, 1993 , pp. 3 3 , )
4 8 ; D u Bois, Souls, pp. 1 22, 2 2 5 ; W. E. B. D u Bois, "The Souls
of White Folk," in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering
)
Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1 9 9 5 , p. 456; Richard Wright,
"The Ethics of Living Jim Crow"; Marcus Garvey, The Philoso
phy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, vols. I and 2, ed. Amy
(
Jacques-Garvey 1 923, 1 9 2 5 ; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1992 ;
(
Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India 1 946; rpt. New York:
)
Anchor Books, 1 9 5 9 , quoted in Chomsky, Year SOl, p. 20; Martin
(
Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait 1963; rpt. New York: Men
)
tor, 1964 , p. 82; Malcolm X, 8 April 1964 speech on "Black
Revolution, " in I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Phi-
1 58
NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 3-1 7
losophy, ed. Fred Lee Hord (Mzee Lasana Okpara) and Jonathan
Scott Lee (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995 , )
pp. 277-78; Fanon, Wretched, pp. 40-42; Cesaire, Discourse,
pp. 20- I; "Statement of Protest," in Moody, Indigenous
Voice, p. 3 60.
50. "Knox was an influential figure in the development of British
'race science'-perhaps the most influential at mid-century
whom Darwin cites with respect if not absolute approval. " Pat
Nineteenth Century, " in Pieterse and Parekh; The Decoloniza
tion of Imagination, p. 47
5 1 . Lindqvist, "Exterminate, " pts. 2 and 4; and Brantlinger, '' 'Dy
ing Races.' "
5 3 . Kiernan, Imperialism, p. 1 4 6 . See also Okihiro, chap. 5, "Perils
of the Body and Mind, " in Margins and Mainstreams, pp. I I 8-47
5 4. Kiernan, Lords, pp. 1 7 1 , 237.
55. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial
Basis of European History (New York: Scribner's, 1 9 1 6 ; Lothrop )
Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World
)
Supremacy (New York: Scribner's, 1 920 . For a discussion, see
Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America
( )
1963; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1 9 6 5 , chap. I S . Gossett points
Gatsby, disguised as The Rise of the Colored Empires.
5 6 . Kiernan, Lords, p. 27.
5 7. Quoted in Dower, War without Mercy, p. 1 60.
5 8 . Kiernan, Lords, pp. 3 1 9-20.
5 9 . Ibid., p. 69
60. Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 3 1 3-14.
61. Dower, War without Mercy, pp. 1 73-78.
62. Okihiro, "Perils, " pp. 1 3 3 , 129.
) 6 3 . W. E. B. Du Bois, "To the Nations of the World, " and "The Negro
( )
Problems" 1 9 1 5 , both in Lewis, Du Bois, pp. 639, 48.
64. Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A R eport on the Bandung
Conference ( 1 9 5 6; rpt. Jackson: University Press of Missis
sippi, 1994 .)
6 5 . See Moody, Indigenous Voice, pp. 498-5 05.
1 59
 NOTES TO PAGES 1 28-32
NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 8-28

7 8 . Dower, War without Mercy, chap. !O, "'Global

Policy with the
6 6 . Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nation
alist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard ( 1 9 7 1 j rpt. New Yamato Race as Nucleu s," pp. 262-90 .
David Harvey,
York: Basic Books, 1 974), p. 5 . 79. For a critique from the Left, see, for example,
: An Enquir y into the Origin s
6 7 . Douglass, Narrative, p . !O7. The Condition of Postmodernity
of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackw ell, 1 990).
6 8 . Baldwin, Nobody Knows, pp. 67-68.
rse of Modernity:
80. Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discou
69. See Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berke ridge: MIT
Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Camb
ley: University of California Press, 1 982). le, Dussel , Invention
Press, 1 987). For critiques, see, for examp
70. Young, White Mythologies. " Life-Worlds, Moder nity, and
of the Americas; and Outlaw ,
7 1 . See, for example, Edward Blyden's A Vindication of the African
Philosophical Praxis."
Race ( 1 8 5 7 ).
8 1 . O'Neill, "Justice."
72. See Russell et al., The Color Complex. Does the Negro
82. Richard R. Wright Jr. (not the novelist), "What
7 3 . For the long history of the systematic evasion of race by the the Emergence
Want in our Democracy?" in 19 10-193 2 : From
most famous theorists of American political culture, see Rogers of the NA.A. C.P. to the Beginn ing of the New Deal, vol. 3 of A
M. Smith, "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multi Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States,
ple Traditions in America, " American Political Science Review ed. Herbert Aptheker (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1 9 7 3 ),
87 ( 1 9 9 3 1 : 5 49-6 6 . Smith points out (pp. 5 5 7-5 8 ) that "the cumu
PP 28 5-93
lative effect of these persistent failures to lay out the full pattern y: A Theory of
8 3 . Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monke
of civic exclusion has been to make it all too easy for scholars African-American Literary Critici sm (New York: Oxford Uni
to conclude that egalitarian inclusiveness has been the norm," versity Press, 1 9 8 8 ), pp. xxi, xxiii, 47, 49
whereas "the exceptions obviously have great claim to be ranked 84. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Writing 'Race' and
the Difference It
, and Differe nce (Chicago:
as rival norms." Makes, " in Gates, ed., "Race, " Writing
74. Or at least my preferred version does. As earlier mentioned, University of Chicago Press, 1 98 6 ), pp. 1-20. (
es, Racism,
racist versions of the "Racial Contract" are possiblej these would 8 5 . Anthony H. Richmond, Global Apartheid: Refuge
and the New World Order (Toronto: Oxford Univer
sity Pres,
take whites to be intrinsically exploitative beings who are bio
logically motivated to set up the contract. 1 994).
7 5 . For representative works in legal theory, the original home of
the. term, see Delgado, Critical Race Theory; and Kimberle Cren
shaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds.,
Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Move
ment (New York: New Press, 1 99 5 ). The term, however, is now
beginning to be used more widely.
7 6 . Quoted in Dower, War without Mercy, p. 1 6 1 .
7 7 . Boston Globe article by the Japan historian Herbert Bix, 1 9 April
1 992, quoted by Chomsky, Year 501, p. 239. See also James Yin
and Shi Ymng, The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History
in Photographs, ed. Ron Dorfman and Shi Young (Chicago: Inno
vative Publishing Group, 1 996).

1 61
160
INDEX
Abu-Lughod, Janet 1., 72
Adams, John, 57
Africa.See Dark Continent
Africans. See Blacks; Slavery
Alcoff, Linda, I 3 9nI I , I43n4I
Algerian war, 101, I 5 6-57n29
Allen, Anita L., 77
Allen, Theodore W., I48n50,
I 5 rn84
America, Richard F., I44-4 5 n 5 6
Amin, Samir, 3 4
Apartheid, 28, 4 8 , 86, ro9
Aristotle, 5 3 -54, 5 9 , 93
Ashcraft, Richard, I49n 5 5
Association, French colonial,
doctrine of, 2 5 -26
Atomic bomb, use of, 100
Augustine, 5 4
Australian Aborigines: aesthetic
status of, 6 1 ; epistemic status
of, 60; honorary, 108; killing
of, 28-29, 8 3 , 87, 99, I P n95;
moral status of, 79-80;
nonexistence of, 5 0, 97; protest
statement of, 1 1 2-1 3; in white
schools, 89
Baldwin, James, 88, 97, I I 9
Bandung Conference, I I 7
Barbarians: Grotius on, 64; and
Mill's harm principle, 94,
I49n57; and Roman precedent,
23; status of, compared to
savages, 1 3 , 5 7 , 7 9 . See also
Subpersons
Barker, Ernest, I 3 5 n2, I 3 7nI
Bataille, Gretchen M. ,
I 3 9-40nI 3
Beccaria, Cesare, 99-100
Belgian Congo, 99, 104, I 5 5 n I 9,
1 5 7n30
Bell, Derrick, I44n54
Belloc, Hilaire, I 3 9n6
Berkhofer, Robert, Jr., I 3 9-40nI 3
Berlin Conference, 30
Bernal, Martin, 44-45
Bilton, Michael, I 5 6-57n29,
I 5 8n47
Bird, Robert Montgomery,
I 5 8n44
Bix, Herbert, I 6 0n77
Black Peril, I I 4
Blacks: aesthetic status of,
6 1-62; bodies of, 5 I-5 3;
ideological conditioning of, 88;
as ignorant, 44-46; as
1 63

INDEX
Blacks
(cont.)
invisible, 96-97; Kant on, 7 1 ;
killing of, 9 9 , 1 5 5nI9, 1 5 6n26;
and Locke, 67-68; moral status
of, 2 1 , 24-2 5 , 26, 28, 30, 5 7 ;
oppositional theory of, 1 3 1-32;
struggle for respect of, I l 9-20
Blaut, James M., 34, 143-44n45 ,
144n50
Blyden, Edward, 1 60n7 1
Body, nonwhite: aesthetic
norming of, 6 1-62;
appropriation of, 99,
1 5 5 - 5 6n2o; and body politics,
120; microspace of, 5 1-5 3
Body, white, 6 1
Bowser, Benjamin P., 141n30,
143n41
Boxer rebellion, 85, I l 4
Brandon, William, 1 5 2n9 1
Brantlinger, Patrick, 1 5 9nn50, 5 1
Brown, John, 109
Browne, Robert S., 1 4 5 n 5 9
Brunschwig, Henri, 1 43n38
Buck, Pearl, I l 5
Bull, Sitting, I l l-12
-Burke, Edmund, 1 2 3
Cabixi, Daniel, 88
Caldwell, Malcolm, 144-45n56
Calley, William, 1 0 1 , 1 5 6-57n29
Carey-Webb, Allen, 140-4In21
Carlyle, Thomas, 1 5 3n3
Cesaire, Aime, 103-4, I l 2
Chaudhuri, Nupur, 1 37-38n3
China, and Chinese, 79, 8 1, 8 5 ,
1 1 4, 1 2 8
Chinweizu, 143n38
Chomsky, Noam, 105, 108,
144n52, 1 6 0nn
Christianity, colonial role of,
22-2 3, 46, 5 4-5 5
Churchill, Ward, 1 1 2, 1 3 9n12
Clark, Andy, 1 5 3n4 .
Cognition: and concepts, 6-7;
and ethics, 94-96 (see also
1 64
Herrenvolk ethics); and social
structure, 1 2 3-24; and white
cognitive dysfunction, 1 8-19,
94-98 (see also Epistemology:
of ignorance, prescribed by
Racial Contract); and whites as
real cognizers, 44-46
Colonialism, European: 1 3 ,
20-21, 29-30, 73; and colonial
contract, 2 5 -26, 83-84; and
education, 89; and Jewish
Holocaust, 103-6; and rise of
Europe, 34-3 5 ; and silence of
most European ethicists, 94;
wars of, against nonwhites,
8 5 -86, 98-100
Conrad, Joseph, 45, 47, 105
Consent: in ideal contract, 3,
106-7, 1 3 6n7; in Racial
Contract, I I , 14, 106-7,
1 37nI l
Contract. See Racial Contract;
Sexual Contract; Social
contract
Cook, Scott B., 146nI l, 1 5 9n52
Coppola, Francis Ford, 47
Count, Earl, 1 5 0n66
Crenshaw, Kimberle, 1 60n75
Curtin, Philip D., 23
Dark Continent, 44-46
Darwinism, and Social
Darwinism, 3 3 , 60, I l 3, 1 2 5 ,
1 5 9n50
Dashwood, C. J., 1 5 2n9 5
de Beauvoir, Simone, 108
Delgado, Richard, 149n59,
1 60n75
de Man, Paul, 7 1-72
D'Emilio, John, 147n30
Denton, Nancy A., 142-43n37,
144n54, 1 5 0n74
d'Entreves, A. P., 1 3 9n7
Dieterich, Heinz, 1 5 7n36
Diop, Cheikh Anta, 1 4 5 -46n8
Discovery, Doctrine of, 24
Dollard, John, 1 5 4n9
Dorfman, Ron, 160nn
Douglass, Frederick, 88, I l 9
Dower, John W., 1 5 1n86,
1 5 6nn22, 27, 1 5 9nn57, 6 1 ,
1 60n76, 1 6 1n7 8
v. Sanford, 24-25
Dred Scott
Drinnon, Richard, 28, 49-50, 80,
97, 146n14, 148n38 , 1 5 5nI7,
1 5 6-57n2 9, 1 5 8n44, 1 5 9n60
Du Bois, W. E. B., 3 3, 109, 1 1 2,
I l 7, 1 3 2
Dudley, Edward, 145n3
Dussel, Enrique, 1 3 9-40n 1 3,
1 6 1n80
Ellis, John, 1 3 9n6, 1 5 6n26
Ellison, Ralph, 96-97
Engels, Frederick, 1 9, 94
Enlightenment, 23, 61, 64, 122,
129
Epistemology: and cognitive
resistance, I l 9-20, 1 3 1-32;
and epistemological
communities, 1 3 9nI I; of
ignorance, prescribed by Racial
Contract, 1 8-19, 93, 96-98;
and norming of individual,
5 9-6 1; and norming of space,
44-46; political, 1 22-24; and
standpoint theory, 109- I I
Europe: and atrocities against
nonwhites, 98-1 01 (see also
Holocaustl; and borderline
Europeans, 78-80, 104; and
European colonialism (see
Colonialism, European); and
European miracle, 3 3 -34,
74-75
Eze, Emmanuel, 70-71
Fanon, Frantz, 48, I I 2, 1 40n 1 5 ,
1 47nn27, 3 0 , 1 5 2nl02,
1 5 6-57n29
Feminist theory, 2-3; and
cognition, 123, 1 3 9nI I; and
INDEX
contract theory, 6, 1 3 6-37n9
(see also Sexual Contract); and
male political philosophy,
9 3 -94; and state-of-nature
gender equality, 32. See also
Women, subordination of
Fieldhouse, D. K., 143n38
Filmer, Robert, 8 1
Finkelstein, Norman G.,
1 5 7-5 8nn37, 3 8
Finley, Moses I., 5 5
, Frank, Andre Gunder, 3 4
Frankenberg, Ruth, 52, 1 37-38n3,
1 5 3n5
Franklin, Benjamin, 62
Fredrickson, George M.,
1 3 9-40nI3, 142-43n37
Freedman, Estelle B., 147n30
Friedman, Marilyn, 1 5 3n4
Gambill, Jerry, 88-89
Garvey, John, 1 5 8n41
Garvey, Marcus, I I 2
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ' 1 6 1nn83,
84
Genocide. See Holocaust;
Rwanda genocide
Gibson, William, 1 8
Gierke, Otto, 1 3 7nl
Ginzburg, Ralph, 1 5 2n94, 1 5 6n24
Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, I I 7
Goldberg, David Theo, 47-48
Goldman, Alvin 1., 9 5
Gordon, Lewis R., 5 1, 97-98
Gossett, Thomas F., 1 5 9n5 5
Gotanda, Neil, 1 60n75
Gould, Stephen Jay, 148n43
Grant, Madison, 1 5 9n5 5
Great Chain of Being, 1 6
Grotius, Hugo, 64, 9 4
Habermas, Jl1rgen, 70, 129
Hacker, Andrew, 8 1 , 144n 5 4
Haitian revolution, 8 5 -86, I I 4
Hall, Ronald, 1 48n48, 1 60n72
Hampton, Jean, 1 3 5 n2, 1 3 6n7,
1 37nI I
1 65

INDEX
Hancock, Ian, 1 5 6n28
Hanke, Lewis, 1 40nn I 9, 20
Harding, Sandra, 34, 146n9
Harmand, Jules, 2 5 -2 6
Harris, Cheryl 1 . , 1 5 4n8
Harris, Robert, I04
Hartwig, M. C., 147n26,
1 5 4-5 5n14
Hartz, Louis, 142n3 5
Harvey, David, 1 6 In79
Headrick, Daniel R., 1 5 6n25
Healy, David, 143n38
Hegel, G. W. F., and
Hegelianism, 5 8 , 82, 94
Heidegger, Martin, 71-72
Hereros, 8 5 -86, 1 5 7n30
Herrenvolk democracies, 28
Herrenvolk ethics, 1 6-17, 23, 27,
9 6, 108, I I O-I I
Herrnstein, Richard J., 144n5 3
Hilberg, Raul, 1 5 5 11I 6, 1 5 6n28
Hitler, Adolf, I05-6, 1 5 7-5 8n3 8
Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 12; and
cognition, 1 2 3 ; and
conventionalist morality,
1 4-1 5 , 1 3 9n6; and natural law,
1 7; racialized state of nature
in, 47, 64-67; unsafe state of
nature in, 3 2
Hoetink, Harmannus, 6 1
Hofer, Bruni, 1 5 7n3 6
Holocaust: African (see Slavery:
death toll of African);
American (see Native
Americans: genocide of);
debate over uniqueness of.
Jewish, 102-6, 1 5 5 n I 6, 1 5 7n30;
Jewish, 100-101, I I?
Horsman, Reginald, 142n34
Hulme, Peter, 1 3 9-40nI 3
Hume, David, 5 9, 94, 107
Ignatiev, Noel, 1 5 In85, 1 5 8n41
Imperialism. See Colonialism,
European
Indian Mutiny, 8 5 -86
1 66
Innocent IV, 22
Irish, 78-80, 1 5 In84
Isaacs, Harold R., 1 4 In30,
1 5 In81
Jackson, Helen, 1 4 In3 1
Jamaican Morant Bay uprising,
85
James, C. 1. R., 1 5 6n23
Jameson, Fredric, 74
Japan, and Japanese, 3 1, 3 6; as
honorary whites, 80-8 1;
postwar victory plans of, 128;
as threat to global white
supremacy, I I 5 - 1 6, 127-28;
victory over Russia, 1 1 4, I I 6;
war crimes against, 99-IOO;
war crimes of, 127-28; and
Yellow Racial Contract,
127-28
Jefferson, Thomas, 28, 62
Jennings, Francis, 49, 5 4-5 5 , 64
Jews: as borderline Europeans,
78-80, I04; genocide of,
IOO-IOI, 1 5 5n I 6 (see also
Holocaust: debate over
uniqueness of Jewish)
Jones, Eric, 143-44n45
Jordan, Winthrop D., 6 1-62, 80
Kant, Immanuel, 5; as father of
the modern concept of race,
69-72, 1 5 0n66; and Herrenvolk
Kantianism, 96; objectivist and
egalitarian morality in, 14-16;
unwritten books of, 94; and
women, 5 3 . See also Persons
Katz, Steven T., 1 5 5 n I 6
Kellner, Douglas, 146n I 5
Kiernan, Victor G . , 3 5 , 8 6 , I04,
I I4-1 5 , 14onI6, 143nn38, 40,
1 44n5 I, 1 5 4nlo, 1 5 9nn 5 8, 5 9
Kinder, Donald R., 144n54,
1 5 4n6
King, Martin Luther, Jr., I I 2
Kipling, Rudyard, 5 7
Knox, Robert, I I 3
Kymlicka, Will, 1 3 5 n2, I 3 8n5
Las Casas, Bartolome de, 23, I 0 5 ,
108
Lawson, Bill E., 7 7
Lehman, David, 1 5 0n70
Lessnoff, Michael, 1 3 5n2, 1 3 7nI
Lindqvist, Sven, 105, 1 5 6n26,
1 5 9n5 1
Locke, John, 5 ; and cognition,
123; and expropriation and
slavery contracts, 67-68 ; and
Herrenvolk Lockeanism, 96;
and natural law, 1 7, 86-87;
objectivist and egalitarian
.
morality in, 14-16; and pnvate
property, 3 1-32; and ta it
consent, 72, 107; unwn tten
books of, 94; voluntary
consent in, 8 1-82
L6pez, Ian F. Haney, 148n50
Lovejoy, Arthur 0., 1 3 9nlo
Lynching, 5 2, 86-87, 100
Macleod, Don, 108
Malcolm X, I I 2
Maran, Rita, 1 5 6-5 7n29, 1 5 8n42
Marketti, James, 1 4 5 n 5 8
Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 3 3, 82,
94, 1 2 1 , 123, 1 3 1
Massey, Douglas S., 142-43n37,
144n54, 1 5 0n74
May, Larry, 15 3n4
Mayer, Arno, I02-3, 1 5 5 nI6,
1 5 7n30
Mendus, Susan, 147n3 1
Mestizaje, Latin American, 30,
1 43n41
Meyer, Klaus, 1 5 7n 3 6
Mill, John Stuart, 60, 94, 149n57,
1 5 3n3
Miner, Earl, 15 In82
Minority Rights Group, 143n41
Montesquieu, 97
Moody, Roger, 1 3 5n3, 1 5 8n46,
1 5 9n65
INDEX
Moral psychology: origins of, in
ideal contract, 5, IO; origins of,
in Racial Contract, IO-I I, 23,
40, 57, 72, I02; racialized s
:
subject for study by cogmuve
science, 92-96. See also
Herrenvolk ethics; specific
contracts
Morel, E. D., 1 5 5 n I 9
Morrison, Toni, 5 8, 7 6
Mosse, George 1., 61, 7 0
Mudimbe, Valentin Y., 44, 46,
I 3 9-4011 I 3
Miihlmann, Wilhelm, 1 5 0n66
Murray, Charles, 144n 5 3
My Lai, 4 7 , 101, I08, 1 5 6-57n29
NAACP (National Association
for the Advancement of
Colored People), 1 5 1-5 2n90
Native Americans: education of,
88-89; epistemic status of, 5 9;
genocide of, 28, 83, 98-99,
1 5 5 11 I 6 , 1 5 7-58n38; Hitler on,
1 5 7-58n38; Hobbes on, 6 5 -66;
Jefferson on, 28; Kant on, 7 1 ;
Locke on, 67; moral status of,
2 1 -24, 28 , 30, 46, 5 7 , 7 1 ,
14In3 I; nonexistence of,
49-50, 97; numbers of, 142n3 5 ,
146n21
Naturalized account, 5 -7, 9 1-92,
1 :1.0-24
Natural law, 1 5 -17, 4 6
Nazi policy: and borderline
Europeans, 78-80, 100-101;
and debate over uniqueness of
Jewish Holocaust, 102-6,
1 5 5 n I 6, 1 5 7n30; and Kantian
theory, 72; and race science,
125
Nehru, Jawaharlal, I I 2
Nonwhites. See Subpersons
Novak, Maximillian E., 1 4 5 n3
Nozick, Robert, 77
1 67

INDEX
Off-whites. See Europe: and
borderline Europeans
Okihiro, Gary Y., I I 6-17,
1 5 1n87, I 5 9n 5 3
Okin, Susan Moller, 1 3 6-37n9,
1 5 2nl
Oliver, Melvin 1., 37-38
Omdurman, battle of, 100,
1 5 6n26
O'Neill, Onora, 1 30, 1 5 0-5 1n7 6
Opotow, Susan v. , 96
Outlaw, Lucius, Jr., 5 6, 1 6 1 n80
Pacific War, 1 27-28
Pagden, Anthony, 2 1 , 140n l 6,
1 4 1n24, 143n38
Pal, Radhabinod, 100
Parekh, Bhikhu, 1 5 3n2
Pateman, Carole, 6, 1 9,
1 3 6-3 7ll9
Patterson, Orlando, 5 8
Paul III, 22
Pearce, Roy Harvey, 43, 1 48n42
Peller, Gary, 1 60n75
Persons: centrality of, in modern
moral theory, 1 5 -1 6, 5 5 -5 6;
created as white, by Racial
Contract, I I, 6 3 -64; relation
of, to subpersons, 1 6- 1 7,
5 6- 5 9 . See also Subpersons;
Transformation of humans;
Whites
Philosophy, whiteness of, 1-2, 4,
92-93, 1 2 1-22, 124, 1 3 5nl
Pieterse, Jan P. Nederveen,
145n2, 1 5 2nn9 1, 99
Pittock, A. Barrie, 147n23
Plato, I S, 93, 1 2 3
Poliakov, Leon, 1 1 7- 1 8, 1 5 0n66
Popes, and papal
pronouncements, 20, 22-23,
1 00
Postmodernism, I I I , 1 2 9
Potter, Elizabeth, 1 3 9nI I
Pratt, Mary Louise, 43
1 68
INDEX
Rape of Nanking, 1 2 8 Shapiro, Thomas M., 37-38
Price, A. Grenfell, 142n3 5 ,
Rawls, John, 4 - 5 , 1 0 , 1 9, 70, 77, Signifyin/g), 1 3 1-32
1 5 2n95
1 3 6n5 Silet, Charles 1. P., 1 3 9-40n I 3
Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, 108 Sim, Kevin, 1 5 6 -5 7n29, 1 5 8n47
Race: centrality of, to moral and
Reparations, 3 7-40 Simpson, Christopher, 1 5 6n28,
political theorizing of
Requerimiento, 22-23 1 5 7n3 1
subpersons, I I O-13; as
Retamar, Roberto Fernandez, Slavery: contract, 24-25, 67-68,
constructed, I I , 6 3 , 1 2 5 -27;
1 3 9-40n I 3 8 3-84, 1 3 1; contribution of
and critical race theory,
Reynolds, Henry, 142n3 5 African, to industrial
1 2 5 -27; and disparities in
Rhodes, Cecil, I I 4 revolution, 34; death toll of
wealth, 3 6 -40; evasion of, in
Richmond, Anthony H., 1 6 m8 5 African, 83, 99; and education
political theory, 160n73; and
Rodney, Walter, 3 4
group interests, 1 5 4n6; as of slaves, 88; Locke on, 67-68;
Roediger, David, 1 3 7-38n3
normative rather than deviant, Montesquieu on, 97; moral
Romani, 1 0 1
14, 26-27, 5 6-57, 93, 122; and improvement of Africans
Roosevelt, Theodore, 5 0
origins of racial oppression, 2 I , through, 94; as natural, 5 3 -54;
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: a s cited
62-63; and racial etiquette, punishments of, 100;
by Harmand, 26; and ideal
5 2-5 3, 1 5 4n9; and racism as relationship to freedom of, 5 8 ;
contract, 69; and naturalized
bad faith, 98; as replacing and seasoning of slaves, 84
bogus contract, s;
religious exclusion, 2 3 , 5 4-5 5 ;
transformation of human Slavs, 78, 1 0 1
and subject races, 1 6-17, 5 7 ;
population in, 12; white and Smith, Adam, 3 5 , 3 8
traitors, 1 07-9, 126-27. See
nonwhite savages in, 68-69 Smith, Rogers M., 160n73
also Persons; Racial Contract;
Russell, Kathy, 148n48, 160n72 Snowden, Frank M., Jr., 63
Space in Racial Contract;
Rwanda genocide, 129 Social contract: economic, 3 1-32;
Subpersons; Transformation of
Ryan, Michael, 146n1 5 epistemological, 9, 17-1 8;
humans; Whites; White
golden age of, s, 6 3 -64;
supremacy
Said, Edward W., 27, 5 8, hypothetical, normative, and
Racial Contract /actual): as
1 3 9-40 1ll 3, 143n39 ideal, s, 10, 76, 8 1-82, 120-22,
colonial contract, 2 5-26, 5 7,
8 3 -84; constructivist and Sanders, Lynn M., 144n54, 1 5 4n6 129-30; moral, 9-10, 14-16;
essentialist versions of, 6 3 , 78, Sanders, Ronald, 145n2, 146n 1 3 naturalized, descriptive, and
1 2 5 -27, 1 60n74; different Sartre, Jean-Paul, 20, 98, 1 08 nonideal, 5-7; political, 9-10;
colors of, 127-29; exploitation Savages: and Doctrine of relation to Racial Contract,
as motivation fo!, I I; as Discovery, 24; Hobbes on, 63-72; as theory, 3-7; updated
expropriation contract, 24, 5 7, 6 5 -66; Irish as, 79; Native use qf, to explain the state,
83, 1 4 1n3 1 ; repudiation of, Americans as, 24, 28, 6 5 , 89; 1 3 6n7, 1 3 7 n I I
106-9; as slavery contract, as outside moral and legal South Africa, 28-29, 4 8 , 5 0 , 86,
24-2 5 , 8 3 -84; statement of, I I sanctions, 64; relationship of,
1 09
Racial Contract, theory of: to wild space, 42-43; Rousseau
Space, in ideal contract, 4 1 -42.
motivation for, 3-7; and on, 68-69; status of, compared
See also State of nature
postmodernism, 129; relation to barbarians, 1 3, 57, 79; as
Space, in Racial Contract, 41-43;
of, to oppositional black taking the jungle with them,
epistemological norming of,
political theory, 1 3 1-32; as 47-48, 86-87; and white settler
44-46; local norming of,
this-worldly, 129-3 I state, 1 3 . See also Subpersons
47-49, 5 0-5 1; macrolevel
Racial polity. See White Schindler, Oskar, 108
Sexual Contract, 6, 1 9, 62, norming of, 43-47, 49-50,
supremacy
1 3 6-37n9 74-75; micro level
Raleigh, Walter, 6 5
1 69

INDEX
Space (cont.)
norming of, 5 I-5 3 , 87; moral
norming of, 46-5 3 .
See also
Savages; State of nature
Spain, and Spanish, 22-2 3 ,
29-30, 3 5 , 44, 9 8
Stannard, David E . , 1 0 5 , 1 42n32,
I46n2I, 1 5 5 nn I 6, 18,
1 5 5-5 6n20
Stanner, W. E. H., 1 5 4-5 5 n I 4
State o f nature: and
appropriation, 3 1 -32j
Hobbesian, 64-67; in ideal
contract, 3, 10, 12, 42, 46-47;
as incarnated in (wildfjungled)
bodies of subpersons, 42-43,
47-48, 5 I-5 3, 8 3 , 87j Lockean,
67j in Racial Contract, 1 3 , 43 ,
46-47, 86-87j Rousseauean,
68-69
Steinberg, Stephen, 144n54,
1 5 0n73
Stember, Charles Herbert,
147n30
Stevens, F. S., 142n3 5
Stoddard, Lothrop, 1 5 9n5 5
Story, Joseph, 24
Strobel, Margaret, 1 3 7-38n3
Sublimis Deus, 22
Subpersons: aesthetic status of,
6 1-62j created by Racial
Contract, I I , 1 6-I7, 20j
epistemic status of, 5 9-6 Ij
ideological conditioning of,
87-89j and Kantian theory,
69-72j moral status of, 5 6-59;
personal struggles of, I 1 8-20j
political struggles of, I I 5 - 16 j
violence against, 8 3-87j voices
of, I I I- I 3 . See also Persons;
Transformation of humans
Swift, Jonathan, 1 5 5 -5 6n20
Swinton, David H., 145nn5 7, 5 9
Takaki, Ronald, 1 42n34
Taney, Roger, 24-25
1 70
Thagard, Paul, 1 3 7nIO
Thiong'o, Ngiigi wa, 89
Thomas, Kendall, 1 60n7 5
Thompson, Hugh, 108
Thompson, Leonard, 147n24
Todorov, Tzvetan, 1 5 5 n I 6
Transformation o f humans: by
aesthetic norming, 6 1-62j by
cognitive norming, 5 9-6 1 ; in
ideal contract, 9-10, 12;
through ideological
conditioning, 87-89; by moral!
legal norming, 5 5 -5 9; in Racial
Contract, I I- I 3 , 5 3-62, 6 3 , 78;
through violence, 83-84.
also Persons; Subpersons
Treaty of Tordesillas, 30
Tucker, William H., I48n43
Tully, James, 149n5 3
Turnbull, Clive, 1 5 6n2 1
Twain, Mark, 108
United States: and Americanness
as whiteness, 5 8-5 9, 62;
discrimination in, 37-39,
48-49, 5 2, 75; immigration to,
79, 8 I j and violence against
nonwhites, 84-8 5 , 86-87,
99-100, I I 6j as white settler
state, 28-29, 30, 46, 49-50, 97,
14 In3 1 . See also Native
Americans; Slavery
Utilitarianism, 5 5 ; Herrenvolk,
96
Valladolid Conference, 3 0
Van den Berghe, Pierre 1., 23, 28
Vansina, Jan, 1 5 5 n I 9
Vietnam, and Vietnam war, 47,
101, I I 6, 1 5 6-57n29
Violence, to enforce Racial
Contract, 28-30, 8 3 -87,
98-10 1 . See also Holocaust
Voltaire, 60
Walker, David, 1 1 2
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 34
INDE X
ry
mainstream political theo
Wannsee Protocol, 1 2 8 tem olog y: of
(see also Epis .
Ward, Russel, 147n 26 RacIal
ignorance, prescribed by
Washington, George, 28 5;
Contract), 1-2, 3 1 , 77, 1 2 1-2
50n6 I,
Welchman, Jennifer, 149-
a s political, 1-3, 7, 1 2-14 ,
1 5 4n8 f
76-7 7, 82-8 3; as writing itsel
Wells-Barnett, Ida, 1 5 6n24
out of existence, 7 3-7 7,
West, Cornel, 147n 3 5
I l 7-18 , 1 5 3n5
White, Hayden, 43, 5 4
White wealth. See Race : and
White life, greater value of,
disparities in wealth
8 5 -86, 10 1-2
Wicker, Tom, 144n 54
White moral psychology.
See
Wild Man, 42-43, 5 4
Moral psychology re
1 2 6-27 Wildness. See Stat e of natu
White renegades, 107-9, Eric, 34
itions Williams,
Whites: and changing defin 7
and Williams, Patricia J., 76-7
See of whiteness, 78; class 2 1-22,
Williams, Robe rt A., Jr.,
ng,
gender differentiation amo
24, 64, 67
7;
1 3 7-38 n3; Hobbes on, 66-6
Wilmer, Franke, 49
as invented by Racial 2
Wilson, Midge, I48n 48, 1 60n7
t on,
Contract, I I , 1 3, 6 3 ; Kan
Wolf, Eric R., 1 60n69
71 ; Lock e on, 67; and 1 9-20,
. Women, subordination of,
to
oppositional relationshIp 62-6 3, 93-9 4, 1 3 7-38 n3
hite s, 1 6-17 , 20-2 1, 23,
nonw Woodson, Carter G., 88
5 5 -5 9; as the people who woodward, C. Vann, 1 42-4
3n37
0;
really are people, 3, 27, 49-5 Wright, Richard, 1 1 2, I I
7, 1 5 4n9
p ivileging of, 32-33, 3 6 -40,
Wright, Richard R., Jr., 1
6 rn82
te
7 3 -74; as rulers (see Whi
supremacy). See also Pers
ons; Yamato race. See Japan, and
Japanese
Transformation of humans
3, Yellow Peril, 1 1 4
White settler states, 12-1
Yin, James, 1 60n77
28-29
al, de Young, Iris Marion, 1 3 6n4
White supremacy: as glob
al, Young, Robert, 1 3 9-40n I 3 ,
facto, 36-3 7, 73-7 4; as glob
1 , 27, 29-3 1, 73, 1 60n70
de jure, 20-2
Young, Shi, 1 60n77
1 1 3 - 1 5 ; as invisible in
1 71